SienaFlossDesktops

The past week or so, designed a website to give information about Siena's Informal STEM program, which our FLOSS camp was a part of. We had to learn a fair amount of coding in html and css to make it look respectable. Dr. McColgan is looking into hosting the website. We're also beginning to think about designing phase 2 for FLOSS Desktops (FLOSS II). We need to establish where the students reasonably should be and should know, and where FLOSS II should take them. Pat mentioned the Hour of Code events as a sort of goal ("You can't do Hour of Code without a computer"), but the students becoming developers and coders should definitely be the endgame. Our thinking for both FLOSS I and II is that in FLOSS I, we get them hooked on working with computers, both hardware and software, and introduce them to basic coding (HTML, CSS, small amount of javascript maybe), using open-source software to do so. And maybe by the end of FLOSS II, they have some idea of how deve...

7/10/2017 We reviewed pre/post-assessments from the FLOSS Desktops camp, discussed how we could have made the camp better and how we could have better assessed the skills and knowledge the kids picked up over the week. Overall, the kids seemed to claim more confidence in their knowledge about the inner workings of the computer. There were very few "I don't knows" responses on the post-assessment compared to the pre-assessment they took on Monday. We found, however, that the format we chose for compiling their responses to certain questions made comparing and assessing difficult. We also talked about finding a balance between hardware and software. Having been the creation of OSI, the curriculum focuses heavily on open-source software and less on the hardware, the physical thing sitting in front of them that they most likely were more interested in. Their age levels all varied but they also came from families who had computers (most were gamers), and I think they were...