Education... Kids...

I presented the idea of powered kids at BarCamp Charlotte 6. People liked it enough that I did a duplicate session in the afternoon, since the first conflicted with the hackerspace presentation- which would have targeted the same kinds of people.

Now, a good while later, these things have moved along- i'm an active member of hackerspace, albeit about 8 months behind on dues (i know, i'm a slacker...), and i've had several brainstorming sessions with various people about how to train kids. I used to think it was the junior high school kids, but am now thinking it starts even before that.

So without killing too much time writing this post, here's some stuff:

The facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/poweredkids/  

Can't remember the twitter group...

google group: http://groups.google.com/group/poweredkids?pli=1

i must have gotten a domain too... but i don't think there's anything there.

Gever Tulley wrote the book on kids tinkering workshops. It's called 50 dangerous things- and you can get it cheap online: http://www.fiftydangerousthings.com/

and he's got many videos online: this is my favorite, and one of the shorter ones at 5 minutes. There are many others:

http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.html

Here's one that I first saw- a bit longer, but some nice additional points. Worth watching if you're serious about thinking about this stuff: http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

I had a very long conversation with Keith at Hackerspace last night (we left after 3am, again...) about this and many other things. He took issue with me saying something like, "in powered kids camp, your kids will bleed."  Thus ensued a conversation about safety, tools, and other things. He has never hurt himself with tools, and has 9 rules about knives to my 1 (always cut away from yourself). So if we ever get things running he'll be the safety officer.

So what else?

Philip Dodds and his wife Dei (sp?) are teaching kids to program at area 15. Need to improve on this.

I promised Philip some stuff... some is here already...

he's using codecademy and jsfiddle, and jsbin and more...

Here's the pirate shop tutoring center - maybe we can do this:  http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html  with his valencia tutoring centers.

See here: http://826national.org/stores/

Yeah, first we had the powered kids talk at barcamp, where I met Brian from brian's backpackers blog: http://www.briangreen.net/ and he talked about how he gives his kids cooking knives, and another participant showed me a picture of his daughter with power tools.

Then was various hackerspace charlotte interactions, ranging from soldering class to playing with air propelled rockets and dry ice.

Then a talk with Angela Gala about empowering kids, and eventually Carr hughes on all her work in researching camps for elementary-aged kids (turns out there are not many in Charlotte).

Finally (though it wasn't last) there's tedx ed charlotte:   http://tedxcharlotteed.com/  which we've been assisting with on campus,

oh, and David Johnson, who leads several FLL robotics teams and is the IT guy at the super-magnet school in the office park and is looking to start a high school with a technical focus... currently the oddly named academy of the carolinas, or something like that.

OK, that's what's off the top of my head... 

not really...

YETI robotics http://yetirobotics.org

and the flipped classroom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H4RkudFzlc

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGuLuipTwg&feature=related

and FIZZ:  http://www.fi.ncsu.edu/project/fizz/

and don't forget ken robinson on education

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

and creativity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

OK- maybe that's enough for now. Late for dinner.