December 11-12

Thursday: 1:14-2:30
Friday: 12:25-2:30

   Our Hour of Code event at school went very well. We had students coming throughout the day to participate and learn about coding, and also a lot of kids who came to help the inexperienced if they had any trouble. Many times, we had every computer in our lab filled with students who had never tried computer science before. We also had a few teachers that came down to try the Hour of Code over their lunch break. One teacher even brought her entire class to come learn about computer science. I heard a lot of kids talking about how cool computer science was, and many got very excited about how well they could do the exercises without any experience and in only a half an hour of time. It was a really awesome learning experience for all who participated, and I think the event did a good job of raising awareness and interest in computer science.
     On a less happy note, I found out during my internship period that AppFurnace has an outrageous publishing fee that is tacked onto the end even if you use the free version to develop the app. So, we are going to have to scrap the entire app that we have currently, and start looking into other options for development. This realization was good in some ways, because, as a team, we weren't very fond of the limitations AppFurnace put on us to begin with. However, the realization definitely put a damper on the chipper mood of our successful Hour of Code event.
     I've been getting a lot of good organization and leadership skills lately. This week, I had to do some public speaking when I went on the announcements in front of the whole school and had to choose what I would say. This made me think a lot about how to motivate people to get involved and the best way to get people excited. I also got more experience with the preparation needed to get an event set up. Finally, this week I learned that you can never have enough planned. Even though I felt like we had taken a lot of time to think about how the app would be put together beforehand so that we could save ourselves struggles further along, we were still put in a situation where we will need to scrap a lot of hard work because of something we looked over in the planning stages. Despite our impatience, we should have hashed out the details of all of our options for the app before we started coding. However, not everything can be thought of in the planning stages, so it is important to be able to jump the hurdles in a project when they come up.