Saturday, July 15, 2017

Summer Camp

Coding with Kids: Web Development

I've been busy with summer camp lately.  That conjures images of the great outdoors, hiking and pitching tents, campfires. Not in this case.  The kids and I were in a back room in a tiny strip mall, struggling for bandwidth, learning to use MIT Scratch.  In a next iteration, I took over for the Center Manager and had all three rooms to myself (counting the foyer) so we spread out.  I pressed both HDTVs into service.  This camp was about Web Development; we used Codepen.io as our workout service.  However I had an Arduino set up on the side, as a kind of "coming attraction".

Speaking of coming attractions, the new Planet of the Apes movie has opened at the Bagdad.  I've been following that franchise since the beginning, with Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowell. Here in 2017, the flavor has changed quite a bit, but I've continued to enjoy the science fiction.  I think of how Bucky Fuller claimed we were devolving into a Planet of the Apes thanks to overspecialization.

Throughout these weeks of summer camp, I've been holding up my end of the debate on math-teach. I'm also posting to QuakerQuaker (Q2) but I'm less confidant that archive will withstand the test of time, given the site owners have talked about dumping the existing framework for something else, losing all our writings in the process.

David Koski has branched out into spherical trig lately, looking at the 120 and 48 LCD triangles in Synergetics.  I've been endeavoring to follow from a distance.

Lastly, I'm keeping up with my one Coursera course, Interfacing with the Arduino, that I'm taking for credit.  I'm in the process of auditing a few others, mainly to bolster my HTML + CSS + JS skills.  I was unaware until yesterday, for example, that the CSS grid feature has become available, since earlier this year.  That's going to come in handy and feature in future versions of Web Development, either as a camp or after school.

Arduino Work Station