Gangplank JR

On June 6th we had our first Gangplank Jr event. GPJR is something we have talked about for a long time. We have wanted to provide something for the next generation. We want them to be passionate about what they do. We want to expose them to their creative and innovate side. We recently had a TEDxPHX event that focused on education. We watched Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do School’s Kill Creativity” and Dave Egger’s “Once Upon A School“. This motivated us to really get off our rears and stop saying and start doing!

We had been approached by Jay McGavren about doing something with MIT’s Scratch programming language. So we set a date and told a few people. Jay came in and got computers setup and ready to go. Before we knew it the day was here. We had over 40 people show up including over 20 students under the age of 13. It was glorious. With nearly no instruction (just exploration) every kid created at least one working software program. They even published them for others to see in many cases (you can find examples here). This was merely an expirement. We have so much more planned. If you are interested in helping in the future direction of Gangplank JR please let me know.

My favorite of course happens to be my son’s master piece “Demond Spin” (You can click the image to play).

Comments (1)

Tom Eastmond says:

June 17, 2009 at 12:03 pm

Gangplank Jr was excellent! Both of my kids came home excited that they were able to create things on their own. I saw this link and thought it might provide some ideas for future Gangplank Jr type events – I hope there will be more: http://lostintentions.com/2009/06/04/visual-programming-for-kids/