A group of parents with backgrounds in the tech industry of the Silicon Valley recently began an after-school club at Baymonte Christian School with the aim of getting young people excited about the prospect of a future in computing.
Called the Baymonte Makers Club, the club is designed to introduce students to computer programming via fun projects, challenges, and other activities — much of it through open-source programs made available from institutions such as MIT, Harvard University, and UC Berkeley.
The club, which meets weekly between 3:15 and 5 p.m., is the brainchild of Baymonte parents Reggie Pool, Chris Thomas, and Troy Kitch. All three come from backgrounds in high tech in the Silicon Valley and wanted to find an avenue to participate in their children’s education.
Six months of planning later, and with several more tech-savvy parent volunteers on board, the club had its first meeting on Monday, Feb. 2.
Over the semester-long session, the students will work with computers, as well as programmable boards — known as “Makey Makeys” — that will allow them to create computer programs that can interact with the physical world.
“Anything that conducts electricity can be made into a keyboard,” Thomas said. “We’re trying to give (students) both fun and the intersection with the real world.”
Using the Makey Makeys, club members Kinley and Hadley Pool were able to create their own interactive game — Whack-A-Penguin — in which a player strikes a mallet onto a physical surface, which communicates with a computer through the Makey Makey to attain certain outcomes in the game.
While the club is led by volunteers, the club meets on the Baymonte campus and is sponsored by the school and uses the laptop computers and other equipment.
According to Principal Steve Patterson, he was excited to see the club gaining momentum after working with the parents over six months of planning. As of the club’s second week, earlier this month, more than 25 children had signed up.
“We’ve got some guys who are pretty high-powered,” said Patterson of the volunteers. “They just got enough synergy together.”
According to Thomas, the goal of the club is for the students to tackle bigger, more complex projects as they gain more and more skills. Eventually, he said, he hopes that they will begin working on building a three-dimensional printer.
“The difference between this and a class is a class would have a teacher teaching,” he said. “This has a leader challenging — helping them understand it in a fun way.”
Another positive of the club, Thomas noted, was the large number of girls showing interest in technology — an industry historically dominated by men. Of the 25 students between fourth and eighth grades, the boys and girls are evenly split.
“Almost all the (volunteers) have daughters,” Thomas said, “and it’s making computing exciting, not just for boys.”
For more information about the Baymonte Makers Club, contact [email protected].
