Comic Con Bristol 9th April
http://www.optimusconvention.com/#!optimus-bristol/c105z
I took 2 software engineers from Altran to Comic Con Bristol on 9th April.
We used training laptops from Altran, the iPads from BRLSI and a few more laptops from a social company in Bristol, to give creative coding sessions to kids, and anyone else who wanted to learn.
Comic Con is a family event run in support of St Peter’s Hospice, and other children’s charities — we were invited by an autism society, and several are coming to see how we use creating coding to engage with children. We had a great time at Comic Con and even before it finished, Dawid and Maell were asking when they could come again.
I have a loose outline of activities, that we did at the Guild at Christmas, and at the Museum of the History of Science last April, this time we made interactive comic / space story things:
- digital story making with Scratch for young people
- interactive emojis in javascript for older people
- tinkering with inventing in electronics with LittleBits
It’s about fun and showing the kids what they can do, talk them through their ideas for making digital stories & creative programming in general.
Let them know they can have fun, and get the parents involved, so that the kids can do more when they get home! Show them how to research their ideas, so they can build on them on the computer.
Kids are always so creative, and you get to see things that you have never thought of before.
This time we had a bunch of autistic kids — who are just as creative as everyone else, and very open to expressing their creativity on the computer, with some empathetic support.
Learning to #code w/ @programming_uk @BristolOptimus #BoysThatCode #KidsThatCode #Autism Thankyou :)
We made some friends, and best of all — some of them have carried on coding.
