My 2 seconds of fame during the SAP Go Digital Night at Heidelberg University of Education

Quote from the event video:
"In context of the Snap!Con at the Heidelberg University of Education, the SAP Young Thinkers and their partners celebrated an impressive Go Digital Night on Tuesday, Sep. 24. As special highlight, international Snap! researchers, educators, makers and enthusiasts from all over the world offered hands-on workshops for the young visitors from 13 years on and engaged them to experience the beauty and joy of computing."

Ok and because my workshop (and I) are only visible for 2 seconds in the video, here is some more info from my POV ;-)

Goal of the workshop: learn some basics of programming and robotics, have fun, and experience that IT is not that hard to understand.

The hardware setup was as usual ... 6 mBots paired with either tablets or PCs, accessories, snacks and drinks.

I found pairing the mBots with the MacBooks more reliable than with Windows laptops - there is an issue that the Windows bluetooth driver do not work well with the mBots. I fixed that by using a Makeblock bluetooth dongle which works like a charm. In fact, it even supports download of the programs to the mBots and firmware updates, so it functions like a USB cable (but slower, obviously). Highly recommended for a price tag of about 15€. Makeblock should create a bundle with that for Windows users!

Instead of introducing the participants one by one, I used the same format as in my quick introduction workshops: explaining the robot, the app and some basic commands takes less than 10 minutes. I had some A3 printouts to support the explanations pinned to a wall, and also a few simple examples. That was well received by the kids. Some started by reimplementing an example, others started to experiment right away.

Because we had much more time than in the quick introduction workshops, the participants explored the build-in features of the robot within 20 or 30 minutes and then asked to use the accessories. The LED matrix was the most popular item, followed by the LED strips. I never handed out so much hardware. This is one of the results:

Nearly all participants stayed in the workshop for the whole evening :-)
Great event with a very inspiring atmosphere, I hope it will be repeated.

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