Devoxx4Kids Denver: Having fun with littleBits
A little more than a week ago, on a beautiful Saturday morning, a number of Denver kids converged at Assembly to learn about hardware concepts with littleBits. This meetup was a bit different than our last meeting in that the kids built stuff with their hands rather than on computers.
The workshop was taught by Juan Sanchez of Tack Mobile. Juan did an excellent job of keeping his presentation short and sweet and got the kids building things within the first hour. The event space provided by Assembly was excellent and we look forward to December's Greenfoot Workshop at the same location.
Dan Allen was a big help in planning this meetup. Dan put me in touch with Corey Davis from Denver's Turing School. Corey introduced me to Rachel Warbelow, the pedagogy lead at Turing. Rachel not only volunteered at the event, but she brought a number of students with her to help out. There were a couple other volunteers as well, including my daughter's video game programming teacher from Campus Middle School. Everything went quite smooth with so much help. Thanks all!
Devoxx4Kids USA now owns a littleBits workshop set thanks to a generous donation from Raible Designs. If you're running a Devoxx4Kids meetup with littleBits, please let me know. I'd be happy to ship the set for you to use.
Juan's presentation on hardware concepts can be found on SlideShare or viewed below.
Thanks to McGinity Photo for all the pictures above. You find many more on Flickr.
Our next meetup will be a Greenfoot workshop with Steve Pousty on December 13th. Please RSVP if you'd like to attend!
Posted by James Goodwill on December 02, 2014 at 08:52 PM MST #
Excellent presentation!
And the usage of Littlebits is really awesome IMHO to make it easy for kids to get started!
Well done guys! Great job!
(I'm looking forward to doing something like that with my daughters)
Posted by Guillaume Laforge on December 03, 2014 at 02:36 PM MST #