The Rural Impact Hub, Auburn Development Council and Peru State College joined forces to host a coding camp over the summer at the Rural Impact Hub in Auburn, NE. The camp took place every Tuesday morning for an hour during the months of June and July. We had a great turn out of kids of all ages.
Peru State College and Auburn Public School donated iPads with the app called “Swift” downloaded on them. Each person was assigned an iPad to use throughout the summer when they attended the camp. Some kids even brought their own iPads so they could work on it at home.
The Swift development app was created by Apple and is an interactive coding game that takes you step by step through different levels to learn about commands, functions, loops, conditional code, logical operators and algorithms. Now, that may sound overwhelming but the app makes it so easy. You have to help your character complete obstacles by telling it to move forward, turn different directions and collect gems.
We needed a way to keep the kids excited about completing each level and help them see their progress. Charts were created with each level and sublevels on them and once a sublevel was completed, they could put a sticker on the chart and then once a full level is completed, they win a small prize like bubbles, silly puddy, punch balloons, etc. We wanted to make learning to code fun!
It was a successful two months of code camp, the kids learned a lot and had fun too! We are sad to see it come to an end but we have plans to start another code camp soon, so be on the look-out!