Beaver Barcamp 12 was fun. It is a rather informal information sharing event held at OSU's Kelly Engineering Center twice year. If I had to explain BarCamp to someone who hasn't been, I would say it is a unique opportunity to share information and skills, and make connections with others who have similar interests!
A grid of available classrooms are posted, any you put your topic on a sticky and put it on the board. The dots show how many people are interested, and can earn you a larger room.
I took the Teen Maker Arduino and Raspberry Pi gear to let people get a chance to learn about them. There was a group who spent nearly two hours working on various projects.
This was quite similar to what we for the Corvallis Library's Teen Maker Program. We give them the equipment they need and some basic examples, and then let them go where their interests take them. We had a young man take the example code for getting input from a keypad, and combine it with a servo motor that could act as a locking mechanism for a door or box. This was totally his idea, and he knew it could be done, but he just needed a little guidance. Perhaps the coolest part of that story is that I was busy helping someone else, so one of the other participants, someone with some programming experience, helped him work through the steps needed to combine the two sets of code and modify them to do what he was interested in! So, I found not only a great student, who I hope will come to the Library's program, but also a great mentor who I invited to come assist me as well!
In the afternoon I gave a session on programming in Python that was attended by a dozen or so.
For myself, I attended an interesting session on web comics. Annie and I also tested some paper airplane designs from the fourth floor balcony. Maybe that can be a session topic for us to teach next time!
Good for your!
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