Ages: 8-13

Time: 10-3pm

Location: Sebastopol Community Center Youth Annex

Cost: $225 + $60 materials fee

• Day 1: Paper circuits - Design your own interactive light up holiday cards! Learn the fundamentals of circuit design. Use paper cutters and conductive thread & tape to wire up your sensors and make your card or book interactive.
• Day 2: Programming simple robots - Learn to program visually with Scratch, directing cute animated characters and designing simple robots to respond to sensors with your commands.
• Day 3: Building & programing interactive stuffed animals: Design and make your own interactive stuffie that has senses and can respond to you. Sew the body and wire up electronics, sensors and LEDs to create your stuffie's guts. Then program it's interactions with the world!

You'll take home your own blinky cards or book, your interactive stuffed animal and a programmable microbit controller you can reuse again and again in many future projects.

Project based learning teaches 21st century skills

Many of the most important concepts and skills that kids need to know are best taught by doing, not by watching or reading. Kids in my programs learn:

• How to define problems that are vague
• How to brainstorm many possible solutions
• How to work collaboratively with a team
• How to rapidly prototype and iterate based on testing and feedback
• How to persevere despite many failures along the way
• How to learn to be smarter every day

These are the skills that are actually going to be needed in the crazy, confusing AI-based world we're heading into, not the old school curriculum full of skills which will be (have already been?) eliminated by the computer age.