WIT Hour of Code

We had the opportunity to have a booth at this event! Thanks to all the people that talked with us here at the Adobe convention. There were a lot of technology company's there and it was awesome to see all the kids learning about technology!

Game Design Video

Here's a sneak peak into our game design course. We're offering this course the week of June 2nd and the week of July 14th.

May Free Class: Overstock & Website Setup

These pictures are from our May 3rd workshop. At this workshop we covered:

• Domain Registration: where we showed them how to pick a domain and how to purchase it. 
• DNS Settings: we talked about IP addresses and how they are related to domains.
• Web Servers like Apache and how to set them up and restart them. 

We also heard from special guest, Seth Moore. He talked about their website and how they have a lot of programming going on behind the scenes to make it so when you search for an item you can find the best match to your search. He also talked about how they have millions of different pages for all the products they offer. He talked about how they just make a template site for each one and then they just have to add the new information about that specific product. He also talked about key words and how they use them when they are programming the search engine. He also explained how a majority of the programming is done in java. We had a great turn out and it was a lot of fun! Hope to see all of you at our next free class on June 28th, 2014 @ 1pm. 

New Promo Video for our Summer Camps

Thanks to Tyler Conterio for putting this together for us.  Come check out our Summer Camps.

Thanks,

Seth Iorg

Here's a video we did when we first started.  I think it does a great job of telling what we do.  Teaching students to code and write their own programs has been a lot of fun.  It's very valuable for them to learn it. Coding will become the new literacy, stay ahead of the curve.

We're making a new video that will play at Water Gardens movie theater to promote our summer camps.

March Free Class - Internet Safety

Thanks for everyone who came and participated.  We had a good turn out.  Especially thanks to Adam Moore, for presenting and interacting with the group.  If you missed it, here's more information about Adam our presenter here.  I appreciated Adam sharing his thoughts about how to start conversations and how to keep an open dialogue.  The parents and kids in a attendance really enjoyed it.  Here's some of the highlights from the discussion.

• Communication is the key.  Involve your kids in discussions about what content is acceptable.
• Interact with your family on a regular basis, let them know ok / fine are not acceptable answers to 'How's everything going?"
• Many things on the internet make you feel uncomfortable, talk with a parent immediately (10 minute rule) if you experience these feelings.
• Practice and role play helps to create an environment of comfort.  Have your child pretend they found something inappropriate on a website, then run and tell you about it. 
• Start talking with your kids at an early age.  Adam explained that he's starts his conversations at an early age with explaining about our bodies and the difference between good touch / bad touch. 
• Set electronic limits, with your kids input, such as when electronics need to be off and put away (dinner table, bedtime etc).
• If you're with your family and something inappropriate comes on, ask them how they felt about it. Start with telling them how it made you uncomfortable and why. Take opportunities at least 1 / month to keep the conversations of media / internet safety going.

In addition to Adam's discussion we also talked about services to control internet content and usage in your home.  We touched on:

• OpenDNS
• Net Nanny
• DD-WRT
• Apple Parental Controls
• Windows Family Safety

For more information about how to implement these services go to SimplyCoding.org and navigate to the sections "Internet Safety".

Thanks, hope to see everyone in April for our class about command line and guest speaker Seth Moore from Overstock.com

Feb Free Class: Networking and Tron Competition

To spice up learning networking everyone got to make their own ethernet cord (cat5).  The students did a lot better than I did.  Besides making their cord, we learned about ip addresses, modems, routers and switches.  To rap up, we played a big game of Tron all networked together.  Players battled it out for the grand prize of winning their own router (donated by Jeremy).  It came down to Joey and Will in the final.  Congratulations to Will for taking home the prize and being the best Tron player of the day.  We were too focused playing Tron at the end that we forgot to take pictures of it.

Jan Free Class: Computer Hardware

For our first Saturday class we decided to let the students take apart computers and learn about the hardware inside.  Jeremy Conterio, our java teacher, did a great job explaining the important stuff to everyone. The kids got to take apart and put back together a computer then test it to see if it still worked.  We look forward to next months class, networking. Remember all of our Saturday classes are free so bring your friends.