COSI Camp

Wm has found his tribe. And they are the kids who go to Circuits/Programming camp at COSI! One of his new BFF's also goes to Metro! So Wm has made yet another new friend he'll see in a couple weeks at school. AWESOME!! Metro is a really small school, so I told Wm the fact that people keep popping up from there means that he will have a lot of shared interests with his new classmates.  But, Wm is having a GREAT GREAT GREAT time at camp!! He says that next year he wants to do 2 COSI camps and skip violin camp. Ha! I cannot describe how much I hate driving him to COSI, so this is not good news for me! (Today, a very scary man knocked on my car window and asked for money and I witnessed a drug deal going down. COSI is...not in a good area. The traffic to get there is also a NIGHTMARE since it's right by downtown.)

But, Wm is doing super duper cool stuff!! (So it's worth it.) On the first day, in the morning, they used Snap Circuits to learn basic circuitry; and in the afternoon, he learned how to use something called Scratch to program his own computer game!


Then, today, he spent the morning wiring a breadboard with the circuitry needed to light up a little lightbulb. In the afternoon, they wrote the computer code to make the lightbulb light up, using Morse code, with their name. Wm got a video of that he took himself at camp:


We get little letters every day about what they did and what they are going to do the next day. Here is the one from the first day:

Tomorrow they learn how to program using C/C++ - that's what my students use! Wm is crushing it!! I loved this story he told me when I picked him up today (key thing to know: "the blue group" is the littles, then comes "the green group," and, finally, the oldest kids are in the "yellow group" - Wm is in the yellow group, which is grades 6-8):

Me: So everything was cool after I dropped you off? There were people there the whole way to show you where to go?
Wm: Yep! The COSI woman goes, "are you in the blue group?" And I said, "No. I'm in the yellow group. I'm just short."
Me: Haha!! What did she say?
Wm: She just laughed awkwardly.