Great kickoff meeting today.  The kids were lining up at the door.  We discussed:

• What do you (the students) want to get out of this group ?
• What is a robot ?
• What is programming - example of scratch ?

I really appreciate the student's enthusiasm and the diversity of their interests

Over the break students are encouraged to try out the Scratch tutoral - Click the CREATE tab at the top and run through the 13 steps to your first program.  Please supervise your children whenever they go online.  Once the tutorialis completed, I suggest you sign up (Join Scatch button). You need to join Scratch to have any programs you create saved.  Joining requires a parent as the process required an email address.  When signing up 1) please do not use your last name as a user name 2) chose a password your child can remember.  If you have trouble remebering passwords, I suggest using a password manager such as KeePass (free).  All the tools I will use in this forum are open source applications, so they won't cost you anything but time.

Other points:

• This blogg is the first port of call for discemmination of information.  Please provide me with feedback.  This is my first blogg so I may miss some posts before I figure it out so stay with me.
• If I use words you don't understand, please let me know
• I suggest students use a bound note book for this group to keep all their notes in one place (especially once we start storey boarding)
• Programming required screen time - I suggest asking students to trade off existing screen time, that is, program instead of TV, gaming (phone, Tablet, console) or other.  I hate the idea of adding more screen time to our lives.  Scratch is also avaiable to run on a Tablet so consider programming in the park.  
• Some degree of just trying stuff out is required by stduents to understand what this programming thing is all about.  However, eventually, students should write out their concepts in a flow chart before sitting down to program [idea to self - spend a day on learning about flow charts]
• Please use only first names [never last names] in posting comments and do not identify the location  of the group

The next meeting with students will be the Monday 5th May (2nd week of term 2).