Welcome to Clintonville Academy Computer Club!
The 2016/2017 school year marks the first year of our experimental club. The club’s main goals are to teach technical skills to middle school students, including programming, animation and video editing, and softer skills like collaboration, storytelling, and public speaking.
Each year will have a unique, ambitious project, built by the students. By the end of the school year, we will present the project to the school in a small ceremony, and possibly at a local tech user’s group or conference, where we will talk about the process and challenges we faced, and give a live demonstration of the final product.
When does the club meet?
The club will meet Mondays from 3:30 until 5:30, starting November 7, through early May.
We’ll take a break halfway through each meeting. I’ll provide drinks, but please send a snack. If your child can’t stay that long, or can’t attend each meeting, that’s not a problem. They are welcome, and can attend whenever possible.
Year one’s project
This year, the group will learn real-world programming, and will build a computer game over the course of the year.
I will help the kids learn the techie stuff, and they will write the actual game, including the code itself, the plot, character histories, and will draw all the game’s art. By the end of the year they will understand a programming language, variables, functions, and how to talk to servers. A more detailed description of the concepts we’ll work on is available on the syllabus page.
Can kids who don’t want to be programmers participate?
Of course! Not everyone will take to functions, objects, lists, and whatnot, but more than the minutiae of syntax and logic goes into a game. It needs a plot. It needs characters and their histories. It needs artwork for cutscenes, and character animations. We need writers and artists, and someone who can work a video camera. So everyone, regardless of their technical aptitude, will have something meaningful to contribute to the project.
Speaking opportunity
If the group is productive, I will apply to be a speaker at a nearby tech conference, to talk about the club itself, and demo the game. Ideally, one or two group members would join me on stage and give part of the presentation.
The two conferences I have in mind that I would apply to are Stir Trek, which meets at the Rave theater in April/May and Code Mash, which meets in Sandusky in January (for this one, we would apply after the end of the school year, and attend in early 2018). My talk might not be accepted by either, as they have a lot of submissions, but if either happens, my office has offered use of our conference room to practice in, and we also host local tech meetups such as Girl Develop It, who we could give a trial talk to.
Who are you? What are your qualifications.
I’m Curtis Autery, father to Scout, and will be leading the group the first year. I have been a tech enthusiast since I was a boy, and have been in the professional IT world since 1995. I’m currently a lead software engineer at Mutually Human, and demos of my various side projects throughout the years are available on my current and previous blogs.
In the early 2000s, I volunteered at Tech Corps Ohio, and was placed at a school where I taught their three classes of 5th graders (60 kids total) how to make Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint slideshows; the school liked my work well enough to invite me back for a second year. Around the same time, I volunteered at my eldest (now 20!) daughter’s elementary school, where I ran a before-school program to help a group of kids plot stock market data to see which grade picked the best stock that year. I’ve done other work with kids, from tutoring a handful of 3rd graders one year, to mentoring a teen boy for many years with Northwest Counseling, and even to a couple of less than stellar soccer seasons here at Clintonville. Um… sorry about that.
Can I see what my kid is working on?
Yes. The club will be completely transparent, which is needed for better communication with parents and school staff, and also to better help the kids collaborate with each other. You are welcome to sit in (and learn to program, if that’s interesting to you). All communication not in the normal club meetings will happen through emails to parents.
The code in progress will be a project in the club’s GitHub organization page. Any parent or staff member with a GitHub account can join the project as a collaborator. Just let me know, and I’ll send an invitation.
What’s the cost?
For year one, there should be no cost to parents. All the tools we will use are free, and I will commit to cover any event speaking fees this year.
Who can be in the club? How many?
The project for year one will be limited to 12 middle school students. Any more than that, and the meetings will be less collaborative, and more about me lecturing, which wouldn’t be fun for anyone.
Thanks for reading! Don’t hesitate to send any questions or suggestions my way, and I’m looking forward to working with the group this year.