Monday, January 5, 2015

NCSS 2015 - Day 1

This image was originally posted to Flickr by
SparkFunElectronics at
http://flickr.com/photos/41898857@N04/8406865680. CC BY 
New Year's Resolution - Restart Blog!

Easy to say but tricky to do without something to write about. Hang on a second! I'm hanging out with geeks for 10 days as part of NCSS 2015.

NCSS stands for National Computer Science School. It's a 10 day programming course for Year 11 students (+some kids returning from last year +some overly keen teacher) with two streams Python and Embedded (arduino).

I was here last year doing the Python stream to help me support my senior kids at school, this year I get a go at Arduino robotics.

Day 1: arrived late. I had a uni assignment due that was still being typed when I was supposed to be here for the teacher briefing. (Please forgive me fellow teachers, I promise to make it up.)

First Lecture: Introducing sensors, actuators, processors and have a look at the hardware. To be honest I was a little worried at this point because last year I was really learning from day 1 and this was pretty basic stuff. Have been promised it gets harder FAST!

First Evening Activity: Build the tallest tower that can support a shoe using nothing but newspaper (no not even tape). Our team went with the high risk, high reward strategy that resulted in a pile of newpaper and a shoe about knee height above the ground. :-( May have to conduct experiments at home to do better next time.

Murder Game: A game where you have to "kill" a fellow camper by saying "You're dead!" without being overheard. Last year I died in the first night's activity. This year I am proudly still alive. Murders performed: 1

All Fall Down - Source
https://twitter.com/katrinapuranik/status/551741852085280769/photo/1
Thanks  


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