The summer camp updates

The Alice Summer camps concluded last week. Starting from this week, we have the Java, Robotics and Graphics summer camps for High School children. The students who attend this Robotics summer camp are those who attended the Alice summer camp last year.

Well what do I say? I have enjoyed this week a lot. Students are taught Java on a very interactive IDE called Dr.Java. Also they are taught Java concepts using “Pictures”. In the sense, they have to write programs to modify pictures. “For” loop is taught in context of producing a mirror image of a picture, “If” loops are taught in the context of reducing the “red eye” effect in an image. I feel this is the best approach to teach children programming because they are excited working with pictures. So they have both fun and learning. However since it is just one week of Java, it is not much that they can do but definitely a good starting point to encourage them in the field of computer science.

Apart from the “programming” part, there are other activities like our professor takes us out to lunch  on Wednesday to a cool cafeteria. The children played football yesterday afternoon. The camps are very informal and lots of fun. Especially when the kids make mistakes and are so determined to get the correct output.

There are two things I realized from the camps: I enjoy teaching and it is very creative and refreshing to be among children (I feel I am ten years younger than I am ).

The next week Robotics camp is what myself and the children are looking forward to To program the Robots, they need to have an idea of object oriented programming and that is why Java is introduced lightly to them in the first week.