Sunday 7 December 2014

Jam Packed in Hull

Teaching kids is a weird experience. I'd like to say it wasn't really that long ago since I was in high school myself (for some reason folks don't say high school here). Now I'm volunteering to help teach kids things I would have loved to learn at their age. What I quickly learned is teaching or even just helping is super exhausting but so incredibly worth it. In this post I'm just going to chat a little bit about Jam Packed in Hull and why it made for a pretty awesome weekend.

Early start doesn't quite put it right. I don't know how I used to get to school at 8:30 when I was a little bit younger but the current me definitely didn't enjoy it. Even so I made it during the first event which was an assembly/talk about bullying which is primarily done these days through online harassment.
Alan O'Donohue, a teacher and founder of Raspberry Jam, lead the talk and engaged wih the year 8 students which was a pretty hard task. A lot of them weren't giving answers beyond not knowing. It was the morning though and I'd probably be the same so I didn't see it as a bad sign.
The next hours were going to be a lot more fun though. Today was going to be a mix between HTML and Twine while the school was still in session and a lot of the kids were really into it. Twine is a funky program that lets you write a non-linear story through hypertext in webpages. It generates the webpages for you and handles the Javacript, HTML and CSS involved with making the game. All you need to learn is the simple syntax of Twine and figure out how you want to structure your story. Some of them were pretty creative with the work but a few others didn't quite get it. I haven't used Twine before but it's remarkably simple so I could help with whatever the kids had a problem with. A lot of the problems were the same so it felt like a bit of an IT job. It was good though because kid IT problems are way less annoying than adult IT help. 
The group then moved onto a Chrome extension called x-Ray goggles which was under the guise of hacking. Everyone loves hacking! This was the sort of thing though with using your computer to do naughty things. What the kids didn't know was they were learning a bit of html in the process. The extension allows them to click on elements and change values. One of the tasks was the change the title and picture of a BBC News article. It was more of a bit of fun than anything but the pop culture references the kids were making that I didn't know made me feel a little bit old. Being a teacher must be scary sometimes, 

Before it knew it class was over and kids were going home. The day wasn't over for the Jam Packed team though. After a subway and coffee we were ready to go for a mini game jam of sorts. This event was an after school session filled with kids and their parents interested in what they can learn and make for fun. For this jam we could have used no better software; Scratch. It has been an incredibly long time since I last used scratch but the package is so intuitive you can pick it up in minutes and that's pretty much what the older kids did too. This was my favourite event in the jam because as someone who absolutely loves game dev I couldn't be happier explaining concepts behind mechanics for games. In scratch it's really easy to explain sprite movement or winning/losing events.
As someone coming from computer science I had to separate the more proper way of making something (specifically object oriented stuff) and just help kids make something that works. That's kind of the reason why I'd rather use something like MonoGame in my free time but enough about that.
It felt so fantastic helping out some of the most inexperienced groups. What they lacked in technical knowledge they more than made up for originality and imagination. The only problem was I am no Scratch expert and didn't want to hold their hands throughout the entire jam. My strategy was fix the issue, help them learn something and point them in the right direction and be available for the next disaster while I'm helping out another group.
The jam made for a non-stop 2 hours of crazy fun and when the deadline came I was still making a few sneaky additions to an almost finished game (even though judges had already passed through).

I'm usually not for a "everyone is a winner" scenario but everyone involved had shown such a huge amount of enthusiasm and creativity that every team fully deserved the prizes they got.
It was only at the end of the awards that I realised how late it was, and how tired I should feel. That was when I got to have more of a chat with the JamPacked team over Chinese and learn more about their work and what exactly I was helping. It all sounded brilliant and what I want to be a part of. That was the day over but JamPacked had one third left to go.

After such a crazy first day the second felt pretty relaxed. This event was one of the more structured with timed workshop sessions and talks with a lot of being about Raspberry Pis.

I hadn't used a Pi before then so I thought it was a pretty cool way to get my hands on one for the first time. It was also my first experience of Python which is pretty funky. Between talks and workshop sessions there was also one of teams from the night before who had came back to work on more Scratch and a particular 8 year old girl was there to present her game I helped make in front of an audience(!). Of all things I missed seeing that was definitely number 1.
Before I knew it JamPacked Hull was over and such a great experience it was. I couldn't recommend someone enough to interact with one of the events. It's an important step in the right direction for teaching tomorrows coders.



I want to give a big thanks to Alan, Clare and Dave, KingsWood Academy and everyone else behind the scenes I didn't get the time to properly meet.
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)