- Jason will bring nametags, pens, water bottles, some Cokes, ice, a cooler
- get coffee from Bongo Java (and bagels?)
- open doors, tape up a sign or two ("this way to Click")
- make sure wifi is working
- greet and mix
- set up tables, chairs, power at the back of the room
I'll do a very brief welcome and explain why we have a hard 5-minute limit on the talks. We can have a little discussion between talks, but not much! We absolutely have to keep things moving in order to have time to code later.
Here are the talks (wow, 9 of them):
- Ben Gotow - Design Thinking: No Single Right Answer
- Jonathan Boston - Recognizing Potential Interest In Programming
- Ryan York - Code.org in a Middle-School Classroom
- Ali Deissler - Nashville Academy of Computer Science
- John Wark - Developing CS Curriculum
- Scott Southworth - Programming Is About Giving People Power
- Emily Bristow - Digital Exposure
- Eliza Brock - Teaching Programming At Nashville Software School
- Eric Johnson - The Overton App
(I haven't given any thought to speaker order yet.)
I'll give a 10-to-15-minute Scratch lesson. Here is my outline:
-
About Scratch (or, programming for teachers)
- How to sign up
- Scratch is a playground (exploratory learning environment)
- There are tutorials and curriculum stuff too
- (but for today, let's explore together)
- Scratch concepts: sprites, costumes, the stage
- No art skills required (how to use Scratch's built-in pictures, how to copy an image from the web)
- Introduction to scripts
-
Guidelines for collaboration (or, teaching for programmers)
- Scale it back: keep your scripts super short
- because keeping it simple is key to learning programming
- and because we don't have much time
- One computer per team
- The team member with less programming experience "drives"
- because when you're teaching someone to drive, they drive, not you
- and because of pacing
- The golden rule of improv: to every idea, you say, "yes ... and"
- Scale it back: keep your scripts super short
-
Raise your hand if you need help, and a facilitator will find you
-
Let's pair up!
If we need to set up more tables and power at this point, everyone can help with that.
This is when we need facilitators to help troubleshoot. I have five people signed up as facilitators: me, Eliza Brock, Ben Gotow, Jonathan Boston, and Lisa French.
Discussion time.
Set aside time for everyone to browse and look at what others created.
Originally I had planned to ask some folks to present their work on the projector, but I think this will be better: it doesn't require any judging or projector-switching.
I'll just stand up and say "thank you" to attendees, speakers, Nashville Prep for hosting, and NACS. This won't be fancy.
And I'll ask for feedback. I plan to ask everyone to write on an index card one thing they liked about the event, and one thing they didn't like or wished we had done differently, and drop it in a feedback box on their way out.