A new kind of get-together in Edinburgh (Dec 10th)!

This is not quite a meetup, more of an offer I have had. I do hope we can muster enough people to thank Sara for her invitation.

I have been contacted by Sara Hendrie - those of you who were at our afternoon tea in the Art Gallery may remember that she was there with us briefly with her little boy, a real poppet. She takes IT lessons at Craigmount, and last year had her S1 class busy teaching their parents about the internet and getting them to use email and so on. She said then that this year she would like to have her pupils involved again, and wondered whether Gransnetters would be interested.

The week beginning December 9th is computer science week, and she is planning an event on 10th Dec at Craigmount School, giving people an Hour of Code.

I asked a couple of questions and here is her reply. I have followed the link she gives to the example, and it looks really easy - just dragging blocks across with your mouse and dropping them into position, jigsaw fashion, no memorising bits of gobbledegook techy talk. If you play angry Birds this might interest you to see some of the backroom stuff. I mean to go back and have a closer look.

She replied - "Ok, the aim of the "hour" is to introduce lots of different people to programming code, we are running the hour with all our S1 and S2 students, some of our S3, S4 and S5 students will also take part. As well as that, I have invited the cluster primaries to join us and East Craigs and Roseburn are coming up to the school on 10th December in the afternoon.

The tag line on the website csedweek.org/ says "ages 6 to 106" and it gave me the idea to invite the lovely ladies that we met. by the way, i hope you dont think im being cheeky re the 106!!!

I can assure you that no maths degree is required, nor any more skill than reading and moving the mouse. Here is a wee example of what we might do: learn.code.org/hoc/1. you could show the ladies the video clip and perhaps the first challenge, but keep the rest until they arrive, I think I will use the angry birds tutorial.

I had hoped to pair up your ladies with a student, or pair up the ladies and have the students walk around and help out. I will need to check my timetable, would younger students be preferable to the older ones? I can organise it so that your ladies visit at the same time as an S1 or S2 class. Let me know what you think.

The boy is fine, enjoying primary school at East Craigs and coming on leaps and bounds."

I have said that I will post a message here, and get back to her in a wee while. What do you think? After it we could have a restorative cup of coffee and a cake (or two).