On August 13, I was lucky enough to get to help with the 2nd annual Durham County Library Teen Tech Camp. It was organized by Julia Elman and Sarah Kahn, while Kurt Grandis developed the curriculum. All I had to do was stand in front of a room of awesome teens and teach them to program in Python all day, which was awesome. I am one of the rare people who enjoys public speaking, and I love helping people learn about technology, so I was in heaven.

We had the coolest setup this year: we had twenty workstations, each with a Raspberry Pi, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. We got the Pis through a grant from the Python Software Foundation and the peripherals through donations. The teens got to take home their Pis, plus any of the peripherals they needed, and even though they knew going in that they were getting the Pi, many of them seemed incredulous. It was so fun to see them light up when they realized what it could do and that they could continue to play with it.

The disk image we used for all the Pis had Minecraft Pi Edition on it, which was a brilliant move, I think. For the first half of the day, I kept the kids’ attention pretty well. In the afternoon, you started to see more of them explore the filesystem and find stuff, including Python games and Minecraft, and we improvised to make sure they stayed engaged.

It was a great day, and I hope to get to do it again. I’ve been looking at the Bootstrap curriculum, which uses Racket to program simple videogames, and am hoping to volunteer to run that as an after-school program at a local middle school. I’m very happy to live in an area where we have great people and great organizations, like the library and Splat Space, putting together programs like this for kids.