S.T.E.A.M. 4 KIDS

Engage. Educate. Empower

[steam4kids]

*Cue Awkward Silence...

It's been more than a month since we last posted on our blog, and June was a super busy month! 

Watch out here, as we post tons of interesting stuff our instructors have gotten done over the past month.

*Hint: It's gotta do with micro-worlds, epic launches and of course, FUN!

[steam4kids]

Yup! Learning to code ain't easy. At S4K, our courses are designed to identify your internal motivation and use them to drive you in your learning. That's why we use games such as Minecraft and more to introduce tough concepts. Yes! Learning ain't easy, but its always fun to write your own Bukkit plugins or launch your very own space program!

[steam4kids]

And we're proud to announce that S4K will be developing the curriculum learning materials powering LaunchMe! Kudos to the SUTD students Zijian and Guan Yang for their passion to introduce STEM into education! The passion they have is really hard to come by. We're very excited and looking forward to this partnership. (: P.S. If you have an idea that you think can help change the way kids learn S.T.E.A.M., talk to us or our instructors!

[kanocomputing]

Kano Desktop Manager now on Github

Kano Desktop Manager, aka kdesk, is a lightweight desktop manager optimized for Kano OS and other Debian-based systems, including the desktop background image, icons, and egl screensaver.  

We created the utility from scratch, with inspiration taken from other desktop managers, especially idesk and vdesk. We’ve made it super lightweight, 100% customizable, and added a cool screensaver. Check it out on Github! 

[steam4kids]

It's more than integrating the 5 silos into education. It's about "teaching a child to be able to think divergently". That is STEAM.

[steam4kids]

"I really try my best to be the person I want other people to be." Thumbs up Wil Wheaton!

[steam4kids]

Seems like anything that is "For Education" catches our attention. Check out Levinux!

[steam4kids]

Of Minecraft and Heritage

"Rebuilding history, one block at a time."

One of our instructor took part in a recent hackathon organized by UP Singapore and his team clinched the Best Design for innovative use of technology to re-tell the Chinatown story.

No prizes for guessing what technology they chose to implement their prototype, inspired by this similar project here.

In a nutshell, his team attempted to re-tell the story of the Majestic Theatre, and it's philanthropic owner Eu Tong Sen.

Young players would be able to earn in-game coins by helping Mr Eu bring business to his new opera house. These coins could then be exchanged for various in-game benefits, such as a personal 8 x 8 area to build their own versions of the Chinatown shophouse.

These in-game quests can range from simple question & answers, to codes that require the player to physically be at a particular location in Chinatown, to obtain the code.

This whole idea helps bring together the ideas of self exploration, while bringing stories to life, in a medium familiar to the visitor.

Kudos to Chen Yang and Cheryl for a job well done!

Watch out for more exciting news as they continue to work on the idea with S.T.E.A.M. 4 Kids.

Let us know if you have an idea which you hope to MInecraft-ify too, and reach out to the millions of Minecraft players worldwide.

Check out the other winning ideas here.

[steam4kids]

Our First School Session!

OTL.

Pardon us for the overdue post. Our instructor finally had time to share his experience with the Rosyth School Infocomm Club students.

This was conducted over the recent March holidays at the new National Design Center, in collaboration with IDA.

This was how it went down...

That was the first time we were using the Raspberry Pi to introduce programming to our students, and we were both excited and nervous about how the students would react to it.

There were 20 students in the class, split up into groups of 2's and 3's to work on the limited number of Raspberry Pis that were available.

In a nutshell, the students were :-

Introduced to the basic components of a Raspberry Pi and the Kano OS.

Brought through a brief history of computers and how has the technology helped to advance science.

Given the opportunity to set up their own Raspberry Pi workstation.

Challenged to solve programming puzzles using Minecraft and the Kano interface.

Along with our ex-student and "up-and-coming" Python developer, Wui Hee, we whizzed around checking the progress of the teams, as they tackled the challenges at an amazing pace!

It was definitely one of the best days of our week, seeing the students getting excited about technology.

Once again, many thanks to Faith and her team from IDA for helping us to make this March holiday an enjoyable one for the Rosyth students!

TL;DR

Tips for Educators:

Kids love challenges, and we had 3 groups that blazed past the challenges set up by the Kano. It was a pity we did not have a separate challenge set up for them. *Note to self*

The Raspberry Pi has dramatically improved in terms of stability, so don't discount the experience by telling them to be extra careful of the equipment (like I did...). We want the students to learn to make mistakes themselves, rather than inhibiting the potential learning experiences.

Reinforce the idea that "Computers are Not Smart" but rather the person behind the computer is.

Look out for more of our posts, as we start catching up on our blogging backlog.

Terms used:

Raspberry Pi - Credit card sized computer developed with the purpose of promoting basic Computer Science in School. More about it here. We got ours from Element14.

Kano OS - A fun and full featured OS for the Raspberry Pi, suitable for kids to have fun with the mini computer. It's free for download.

Python - Widely used high-level programming language that makes code easy to read, understand and pick up.

Links:

Kano - http://www.kano.me/downloads

Slides and timeline for the 2 hour session are available here.

[steam4kids]

Looks like our Quick Build arena got destroyed by a random act of Minecraft nature. *Sigh*

Lesson learnt. Make sure to enable whitelisting or some form of user access control to public servers

*We'll be back!*

Terms used:

Whitelisting - Making use of a list/register to keep track of users with certain privileges. It is the reverse of blacklisting.

[steam4kids]

And that is why it is awesome to learn with us at S4K! We call it EdEx (Education Experiments) where our instructors are not afraid to try out new and engaging ideas in our classes. That means getting our students hooked onto learning! EdEx. We Live to Deliver. ;)

[steam4kids]

Back to the Good Ol' Days

Since its release, the $35 Raspberry Pi mini-computer has been hailed as the perfect all-in-one retro game console. Now, it's easier to do than ever, and it doesn't take any advanced Linux knowledge. Here's how to make your own retro game console in about 30 minutes.

Hmm. Let's see if we can get our instructors to get this working on our good ol' JVC CRT. Retro TTM!

[steam4kids]

S.T.E.A.M. 4 KIDS!

Yes! We decided to change the name of our blog to S.T.E.A.M. 4 KIDS (S4K).

Many of our friends wonder, what does S.T.E.A.M. actually mean?

Well, more information can be found here, but in a nutshell, it stands for..

Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.

And yes! That means we will integrate the STEAM framework into our workshops and materials, encouraging life-long holistic learning among our students.

We will provide students with sound fundamentals of various disciplines to understand how they are integrated into everyday things around them.

S.T.E.A.M. 4 KIDS!

P.S. We are doing something Minecraft-y and exciting with educraft.asia so watch out for it!

[steam4kids]

It's not about how much you have. It's about how much you give.

- Heard from a Singapore Short Film @ Clementi MRT

[steam4kids]

Our First Win!

YAY! Our teacher won!

But kudos too, to our student who built an entire planet that came a close second.

I bet if we had videos to go through the builds, rather than having screenshots, our voters would have been able to decide better. ><

Nevertheless, the students enjoyed themselves, and we are glad to have played a part in doing so. (:

[steam4kids]

A Kid Friendly RasPi OS!

Kano OS is the fastest, most fun operating system for Raspberry Pi. Simple, powerful, and packed with code creation projects, in Minecraft and more. Download the beta now!

Thanks to a teacher from Catholic High School who suggested this to us. (:

We have been using NOOBS (available here) to introduce Python to our students, but the Kano looks fun!

We will be trying the new Kano OS alongside our Introduction to Python class so stay tuned to see how our students play around with the OS.

[steam4kids]

Me, My Son & Minecraft

Minecraft - €“"a game about breaking and placing blocks" - is one of the world's biggest-selling computer games. When Jane Costello wanted to find out why her son Otis, eight, was so smitten, she quickly found out about its infinite possibilities

Thanks to Agy for this link! Check out her blog here.

This is why our instructors constantly advocate Minecraft as a teaching tool, and encourage parents to play along with their kids! (: