Informal “activity clubs” in the second half the after-school tutoring session each weekday started during the first week of homework help in Venice; clubs are now up and running at both sites! Last Thursday, a speedy group of homework-completers in our program were invited to a new treat: our first ever Computer Programming Club, affectionately entitled “Get With the Program” by the Thursday staff in Venice.
Über-volunteer Matthew Alvarez Monahan, a whiz at many pursuits but especially an experienced software engineer, stepped up to the plate for this one. Thanks to our generous friends at Google we have an army of MacBooks at our disposal, and to each of these Matt downloaded a copy of the free program Scratch (an application for coding beginners). Ten students brimming with curiosity sat around Computer Programming Club’s café table in the office, and they started to input commands given by Matt with a few simple drags and clicks.
Our Fashion Club, Fluent in Fashion, offers students weekly surveys of new styles in high fashion, and they produce written responses like this one.
By the end of the day, we were walking our first sprites across the screen, spinning them like pinwheels, and programming them to produce thought bubbles with our hilarious comments. It wasn’t as advanced as building a videogame, maybe, but it transformed the complicated world of triggers and commands into something elementary school students could approach gleefully.
In future sessions of Get With the Program, we plan to write basic scenes for our sprites and let them do storytelling through programming. Meanwhile, Fluent in Fashion (Fashion Club) has been busy pouring over the hottest show-stoppers from New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week, and Milan Fashion Week, culminating tomorrow with (you guessed it) the runway standouts from Paris Fashion Week. Until the next blog update, you can find us here: in our clubs.
