Alice, Alice, Surveys, Meetings, and more Alice!

Yesterday was a fairly relaxing day; we played frisbee, took a trip to Hobby Lobby, and collected supplies for camp core concept activities. Today we were not so lucky to have so many fun things to work on. We spent most of our time on our computers today working on Alice and camp surveys.  

This is what spending hours on the computer does to us!

We did get to meet with all of our AMAZING camp assistants this afternoon, though! It was fun and exciting to meet with Kelsey, Beth, Suzy, and Sandy and to hear how much they are looking forward to the start of camp next week. These girls have so much enthusiasm and are really looking forward to helping with camp curriculum and camp activities. We also decided to have two staff teams for Minute to Win It (MTWI) this year. Not only will staff be competing against campers, but against each other as well! MTWI is going to be INTENSE!

By the way, our progress in Alice and camp surveys today was exceptional (just to give ourselves a little 'pat on the back'). Here's what we did:

In Alice:

Janie and I are almost finished with our example game, what we like to refer to as our version of the classic game Frogger. In our game a chicken is trying to cross the road instead of a frog ... It's possible that we may find the answer to the age-old question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?!" We were able to complete all of the collision detection for the cars and implement a second level into our game. When the chicken successfully crosses the road five times, level 2 begins. The difference between level 1 and level 2 is that in level 2 the speed of the cars increases, making it more difficult to cross the road successfully. We decided we would like our chicken to be able to cross a nice, clean, beautiful highway, so we added some flowers, trees, bushes, and road signs to our world. The finishing touches will be put into the game tomorrow!

Nicole started working on lesson plans for the last two days of Alice instruction. She is building a game in Alice to demonstrate the concepts she will be teaching, including (but not limited to): functions, conditionals, collision detection, events, lives, timers, and score. The game that Nicole is building is a type of tennis game. A penguin (controlled by the user) will try to hit a ball against a wall, and when the ball hits the wall it will bounce back; the penguin will then attempt to hit the ball again ... and again ... and again! 

Camp Research Surveys:

Alyssa worked on cleaning up, organizing, and refining the surveys that we will use during camp for research. Students will take surveys at the beginning and end of camp and at the beginning and end of various portions of camp (LilyPad & App Inventor). This is a HUGE and very important aspect of camp for YWiC because we analyze the results of all of our surveys for research posters and projects, and use the feedback from surveys to make camp better year after year! However, going through surveys is a tedious and time-consuming job - which explains why Alyssa looks so stressed! 

We all can't wait until camp starts (Just 4 more days!). Until then, this is Judge Jen, signing off! 

T-Shirts For Everybody

Today's report definitely includes Frisbee just before lunch, which is always a good thing. It also saw us making a quick run to Hobby Lobby for neon-colored team shirts for Minute-To-Win-It, one of our Wednesday night camp activities. The staff team is going to rock this year! I suppose we should start practicing though...

Anyways, here's what today looked like:

Alice:
Jen and Janie reworked the daily Alice lesson plans, so now there are no errors. They had started at the beginning and followed their own instructions, making clarifications and adding intermediate steps as they went. And now it's all set! Pong just got worse and worse, so Jen and Janie started building Frogger to be our example game, since it looks like Pong is not going to happen. They hope to have it finished tomorrow!

Core Concepts:
We clarified some of our plans for the core concept activities and got supplies for the first one (basically we found a bunch of cardboard boxes and wrote a few simple programs for examples).

There seems to be no picture of us working today, so I hope this penguin will suffice.

Lil' D is Pretty Fly!

Camp Countdown = 6 Days! AGH!

Prep is actually going very well. The YWiC staff have been hard at work to make sure camp will be fantastic this year. Here's the rundown of today:


Alice:
Nicole spent most of the day working on the Pong game in Alice after being stuck on the collision detection all of last week. It's almost working now! What made the magical difference? Weird orientation of the objects, so Nicole started nearly from scratch to make the objects behave like it was a 2D, not 3D, world. Now they can only move left, right, up, and down from the camera perspective, and everything works so much better! It should be finished tomorrow (yes, we realize we've said that for a while, Nicole apologizes).


LilyPad:
Lil' D the electric duck is working! It took all of the research assistants working on it at different times, but it's happened. Jen and Nicole mapped out where to place the LEDs, switches, and light sensor, making sure the wires wouldn't cross. Then Jen and Janie worked through the code step by step, testing with alligator clips, then the oh-so-wonderful Alyssa sewed the entire thing and didn't short anything out! It was a good day for LilyPad.


LED Flowers:
This is a new project to introduce the students to circuits, but it takes a bit longer to complete than we'll have time for. Quick fix: Jen and Janie soldered one of the LED flowers in each kit so that the students would have an example to look at, then only have to complete two more flowers. Then they checked the kits for all the materials and got permission to use the department's soldering supplies. (Thanks, Dr. Cook!)

TGIF (Thank Goodness, it's Friday!)

Today should be an awesome day because it is Friday. However, today is NOT awesome. It is a sad, sad day because it is the first day that Google-tastic Tasha is not here at work with us. She is on her way to her summer internship at Google. We are all very happy and excited for her, but we really wish she was here to make us laugh and help us plan camp.

In honor of Tasha, we are posting a link to a video we made for her last summer when she was away at her internship. We post for you "Stuck Like Glue". Please watch and enjoy!

In the spirit of moving on and planning a SUPER FABULOUS camp that Tasha would be proud of, we all worked on trying to get some items crossed off of our to-do list.

Alice:
Trainer Janie and I finished the daily Alice project today. Students will be animating the harrowing story of Cleopatra! She is quite the heroine, by the way - She uses magic to save a Pharaoh from a menacing mummy, making a Sphinx shoot lasers from its eyes in the process!
Nutty Nicole continued to work on the Pong Game; she hopes to finish it up this weekend!

Forensics:
Janie and I also finished creating the programs for the forensics unit of camp. Our students will have crazy CSI skills when we are finished with them!

LilyPad:
Nutty Nicole and Awesome Alyssa worked on LilyPad today. Their newest project idea is to let students create a project that they can take home. Alyssa started sewing LilyPad components onto her stuffed duck today, while Nicole programmed the components to communicate and interact with one another.

We are all happy for the extra day off we will have this weekend since Memorial Day is on Monday. Hopefully it will give us the rest and energy we will need next week to finish camp planning!

Signing off, this is Judge Jen. Have a great weekend!

The Alice Planning, LilyPad Sewing, and Teddy Bear Puff-Painting KEVA TRIBE

First things first, we should get something straight - YWiC research assistants love Keva Juice! And so since we went to Keva Juice, today we will call ourselves part of the YWiC Keva Tribe. The Keva Tribe is a "friendly tribe that has many secrets recipes of blending the finest fruits into nutritious sensational smoothies". Pretty awesome, right?

Alyssa and Tasha sipping on Keva Koladas

Today is a sad, sad day for the YWiC Keva Tribe as they will be losing one of its members for many moons: Google-tastic Tasha. She will be adventuring to Mountain View, CA for a summer internship at Google (the land of free food, slides in buildings, and overall awesomeness) where she will be working on Google+ photos. I will definitely miss the benefits of being part of the summer YWiC Keva Tribe. Most of all, I will miss my fellow tribe mates Awesome Alyssa, Trainer Janie, Judge Jen, and Nutty Nicole. They are hard working, fun, sensational, and really fabulous people who are going to make a big difference in the lives of all of our high school / middle school campers. You rock girls!

In all seriousness, camp is only 11 days away! My tribe mates have been working, working, and working some more.
--> Nicole and Alyssa are working on a sample project for LilyPad. They used puffy paint to make a teddy bear look like a care bear. Once the paint dries, they plan on sewing on the LilyPad pieces with conductive thread to make the care bear play sound, light up and other cool stuff.
--> Janie and Jen have been working on Alice. They finished up the curriculum lesson plans and are half way done creating the cumulative daily project for the students.

On a side note, one of our other tribe mates, Super Steph, is currently in Wisconsin for an internship with GE. This was her first week, so we had a Google Hangout with her to see how she is doing. It was so fun!

Hangout with all of our YWiC Keva Tribe

Thats it for today, if I blog again it will be from sunny Mountain View, CA! :)

 

-- Google-tastic Tasha --

Fantastic Five's Late Night Update

Heyo everyone! So today has been VERY productive, that's why I'm posting so late tonight. Also, we will be signing off tomorrow to take a much needed trip to White Sands -- huzzah!

Today, we pretty much finished the Alice lesson plans thanks to me, Jen, and Alyssa. We've also created code in Python for one part of the forensics portion of camp. Get excited because... it. is. awesome! Nicole has been working very hard on creating a game in Alice. It's been tough, but she's almost finished. And amazingly, Google-tastic Tasha finished the Alice music video for 'Moves Like Jagger'!! YES!

FYI: Tasha also got dreadlocks and turned into a super urban version of herself ;)

Cookie baking frenzy and Tasha's 'urban do'. 

On Thursday, we'll be refreshed from our trip and start on LED flowers. We also have awesome plans for LilyPad projects this summer -- cross your fingers and let's hope that our experiment turns out well! Other than that, we will finish Alice lesson plans, Nicole will work on the Alice game, and we'll maybe even finish programming for the last portion of forensics.

-- Trainer Janie

YWiC has Moves Like Jagger

What am I going to do with these girls (Jen, Janie, Nicole)? They are so productive in the mornings! :)

Before the plan for today should come an update from yesterday's progress... Yesterday we research assistants split up and worked on different things.

Alice 'Moves Like Jagger'

>> Jen and I (Tasha) worked just about all day, very diligently, on our sample music video in Alice. We didn't quite finish it, but I am pretty proud of what we accomplished. We successfully animated about half of our video, and let me just say it looks pretty legit! Who knew that it would be so hard to animate a character to moon walk... Should be 100% completed by the end of the day.
>> Nicole got the chance to work on the sample game in Alice. She is creating the game of Pong. She added a cool sound effect and set up the camera views, but Alice was giving her some problems with updating the score appropriately. Today she will face the trickiness of collision detection, and she hopes to finish the game by the end of the day.
>> Janie worked on contacting the instructors for the forensics section in camp, along with confirming the Fingerprint Formula and adjusting the camp lesson plans.
>> Jen, Janie, and Alyssa were able to work together efficiently on the App Inventor curriculum using Google Docs and checked 'App Inventor Direction' off of our to-do list!

You're probably thinking, "Oh my goodness, they accomplished so much yesterday. What else do they have to do?"
Well... Alice lesson plans need to be finalized since that is the main/longest portion of camp that the YWiC research assistants are teaching. The Alice demos (music video and game) also need to be finished. Can't forget about Forensics! Forensics is one of the students' favorite part of camp, so Jen and Janie will be working hard on using programming in Python to relate to Forensics.

Time to get to work - only 13 days until camp!!

-- Tasha --

Alice, App Inventor, and Janie, OH MY!

Janie is back!!!

Congrats to all of those students who graduated this weekend!

Monday morning... Rolled out of bed and strolled into the office in the 9am hour. I find Jen in the office working through some email and then all of a sudden... BAM! Janie walks into the office! We all rejoice, and are ready and pumped up to get camp lesson plans done: Alice and App Inventor. Only 14 days until camp starts, so we must start putting a dent in our to-do list.

Alice:
Today will consist of hopefully making a sample game and music video in Alice and finalizing/starting the camp curriculum.

App Inventor:
The App Inventor adventure for today will be finalizing the camp lesson plans, and creating the 2012 app competition details. For the first year in camp, we are having the campers enter in an app competition. It is going to be awesome!

Fabulous YWiC Undergraduate Research Assistants at work today:
Google-tastic Tasha, Judge Jen, Trainer Janie, Nutty Nicole, and Awesome Alyssa

-- Google-tastic Tasha --

Planning Alice ...

Storyboarding!!!

Tash and I worked on Alice lessons plans today ... Planning did not go well and we ran into several obstacles, getting .mp3s and .WAV files to play in Alice among them. Looks like making music videos during camp is going to be harder than we thought!

On the upside, our storyboard for our 'Moves Like Jagger' video is turning out nicely! And, on a side note, we know what we need for the Wednesday night Minute to Win It game!

--> Jen

18 Days Until Camp!!!

Jeopardy main screen: Which category do you think
you will be best at answering?

Nicole, Tash and I have been working hard all week planning camp. With just 18 days left to go there is so much left to do! Yesterday we managed to finish the rest of the core concept planning, as well as the Jeopardy review game - its SUPER FABULOUS! We also managed to score some doughnuts from our wonderful boss, Becca Galves, watch Snow White, and play a small game of frisbee!

Today the plan is to:

• Start Alice lesson plans
• Work on planning some Wednesday night activities

Let's hope that today can be just as productive as yesterday!

--> Jen