There were only a total of six kids between both sessions at the program in Troy today. We introduced them to the programmable graffiti grapher applet. I was unable to find the most recent version of the applet, but I found a link to an older version, so I was still able to use it with the kids. The older version was buggy and did not have all the features the newest version does. I hope to have a way to access the newest version by Tuesday so I can get more relevant feedback from the kids.
Unfortunately, all the kids who were present today were younger and did not have the attention span of the older kids. It was very difficult to instruct them on how to use the applet when it was being buggy. The kids would want to give up and not try to work it out. I will wait until I have access to the newest version before talking about bugs that can be fixed. The biggest piece of input I will give right now would be to make the titles of each codelet and input fields more intuitive. It was especially difficult for the kids to experiment when they had a hard time determining what each codelet and input field did.
We had spent the evening yesterday creating CDs for the kids with the beats they had made using the rhythm wheels software. When one of the kids received her CD, she threw a very uncharacteristic temper tantrum because she did not like the color combination we had chosen to write her name on the CD. Fortunately we presented the CDs to them at the end of the session, because she was very upset and would not do anything we suggested after that point.
In Albany, the kids made posters using Paint.net. Their instructions were to create a design using one of the CSDTs they had used previously, then they had to incorporate this into a poster with four colors and a positive slogan. The kids worked very diligently because there was a reward of cookies at the end of the session for those who completed their posters satisfactorily.
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