#summerhonorsprogram — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #summerhonorsprogram, aggregated by home.social.
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Day 7/10 of teaching the Summer Honors Program Computer Science course in Holdrege, NE:
Seems like the second Tuesday is always the point that everyone hits a wall. Even when things are going smoothly, intensely learning and practicing one subject for 8 hrs a day is hard!
This afternoon I encouraged my students to come out with me to the local park for a little nature break. I sat on a merry-go-round to write out a thank you note to the teacher whose classroom we're using, while a spontaneous game of tag broke out. It was good to see kids being kids.
At meal breaks with the other instructors today we had some good discussions about how to best help the program continue well past its 50th year in 2027. I mentioned the idea of an endowment fund, as my college theater/film department had received one from Johnny Carson back in 2009. Lots of good ideas to mull over.
#GiftedEducation
#Nebraska
#ComputerScience
#SummerHonorsProgram
#HighSchool
#SHP
#Rural -
Day 5.1/10, Summer Honors Program, Holdrege, NE.
Sitting at the local Lost Way Brewery enjoying a "Peelin' Good" lime Pilsner after wandering downtown with my camera during the Swedish Days festivities. (And trying my best not to feel self-conscious about wearing a shirt that reads "The Woman Rebel: No Gods No Masters" in deep Red middle America.)
The other day some students asked the art teacher, "Who's the Severus Snape professor?" and she deduced they meant me! 😅
#GiftedEducation
#Nebraska
#ComputerScience
#SummerHonorsProgram
#HighSchool
#SHP
#Rural #GameMaker -
Day 5/10 of Summer Honors Program, Computer Science course:
Phew! Currently melted into a recliner at my host parents' house. This first week of teaching is always a doozy, even when it's going really well (and thankfully it is.)
Yesterday I had all of my students present to me a verbal proposal for what kind of game prototype they wanted to create by next Friday. Nobody chose to adapt a board game like I had planned, but I rolled with it because they all gave me very clear ideas of their vision. Friday morning is the "graduation" ceremony, and I want them each to set up a demo station of their games to display for their peers and families.
Good group of kids, as always. Now for a weekend alone in small town Nebraska. Maybe I'll take my camera down to the "Swedish Days" festivities and see what kind of street photography comes out of it.
#GiftedEducation
#Nebraska
#ComputerScience
#SummerHonorsProgram
#HighSchool
#SHP
#Rural #GameMaker -
Day 3/10 of Summer Honors, Computer Science: One of my students has modified his Asteroids game to have a capuchin monkey firing bananas, which themselves have enough recoil to rocket the monkey backwards across the screen at high velocity.
I am delighted.
#GiftedEducation
#Nebraska
#ComputerScience
#SummerHonorsProgram
#HighSchool
#SHP
#Rural #GameMaker -
Day 2/10 of my Computer Science course is wrapped. We've been working our way through the "Space Rocks" tutorial for GameMaker Studio, an Asteroids clone that does a good job of introducing most of the concepts needed for creating a computer game.
Tomorrow we'll be adding music and sound effects, and finally adding some sweet power-ups. Sometimes it feels like I'm having to go pretty slow in demonstrating, but on the other hand my students are totally engaged and having a great time tricking out their projects to make them unique, so I have no problem going whatever speed they need.
#GiftedEducation
#Nebraska
#ComputerScience
#SummerHonorsProgram
#HighSchool
#SHP
#Rural #GameMaker -
Just got back to my host family's house in Holdrege after happily reuniting with the other instructors and giving the students and their parents a video conference introducing ourselves and what they can expect over the next two weeks.
For most of the Summer Honors Program's history, students from up to an hour's drive away would be assigned a host family in Holdrege to stay with for the full two weeks. The willingness of local residents to house and corral multiple energetic teenagers ebbed over the years, and once COVID hit we switched entirely to having kids travel in each day.
Thankfully my lovely host parents Sheri and Ron have continued providing myself and the other out-of-state instructors with beds every year, and at this point I'd say I feel closer to them than I was to any of my actual grandparents.
#GiftedEducation #Nebraska #ComputerScience #SummerHonorsProgram #HighSchool #SHP #Rural
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Waiting to board my next flight on my annual journey to Holdrege, Nebraska, pop. 5,515.
This will be my 12th time as the Computer Science instructor for their high school "Summer Honors Program," which is now in its 47th year!
Taking a page out of @pluralistic's many books,, this is going to be a Long thread. (Sorry to name drop you, you've just given me so many great ideas!)
1/10
#GiftedEducation #Nebraska #ComputerScience #SummerHonorsProgram #HighSchool #SHP #Rural
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Day 9+1 of the Summer Honors Program, Holdrege, Nebraska, ESU11: A satisfying conclusion to another year of this wonderful high school camp. We spent the final Thursday doing one last big push by everyone to get as far as they could through the remainder of linuxfromscratch.org. I would say this course was in the upper tier of all the ones I've done, though not my strongest.
I'm glad I tweaked my format by giving my students a guided path to follow while I advised, but I'd say everyone gets more out of it when there's a less structured environment in which to explore wherever their curiosity takes them.
They unanimously voted that they want to study game design next year. I've done two courses of it earlier in my tenure, but I've been thinking I might try to bring in someone more skilled in a specific area of computer science rather than my broad experience. Hit me up if this sounds intriguing to you!
#SummerHonorsProgram #GameDesign #GiftedEducation #GetFediHired
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Day 3 of my Computer Science course continued a streak of luck, and it seemed like everyone in the program was in high spirits today.
The Bitlocker locked device turned out to have a recovery key available on the student's Microsoft account, so I had her install Virtualbox rather than tempt fate any further. We acquired a spare Thinkpad for the Macbook student, and the PC student miraculously stopped having bizarre issues.
Partially to give me some time, I decided to ask the students to take their knowledge so far and develop a simple game using a bash script. I showed them Zork, and then left it up to them to figure out how to take user input and create/manipulate variables. They did not disappoint, and now I'm wondering if I should suggest they pair up with the Creative Writing class for some interactive fiction.
#GiftedEducation #SummerHonorsProgram #Nebraska #ComputerScience #InteractiveFiction #Linux
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Eventually almost everyone got the full Debian going, but one student had an Intel Macbook Air that turned out to need a ton of extra work to get proper drivers for even basic stuff like the keyboard, another with a PC desktop that exhibited strange behavior while partitioning the stick like suddenly breaking keyboard/mouse input, and a third student with a Microsoft Surface Go who seemed to have accidentally ended up with the grub boot loader on their internal drive instead of the stick, which broke the TPM config and forced Bitlocker recovery mode to activate (with no key available yet...)
I've learned to take these things in stride, and use it as an opportunity for students to directly learn the process of breaking down complicated issues and troubleshooting through them.
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Day 2 of the high school Summer Honors Program was another success for the Computer Science class on operating systems, although with some more troubleshooting needed on everybody's part so we didn't get quite as far as yesterday.
Using our debian-live USB sticks we booted everyone's computer using the 'toram' option for loading the whole OS into memory, in order for us to reformat the USB sticks and install the full version of Debian back onto them. It was a convoluted process but the only one I could find that would prep the sticks exactly how I needed them for Linux From Scratch development. It also gave the students experience with manually partitioning a drive and learning some about partition tables, filesystems, and EFI.
#Debian #GiftedEducation #LinuxFromScratch #SummerHonorsProgram #Nebraska
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Very pleased that my first day of teaching Computer Science at the Holdrege, NE Summer Honors Program for gifted high schoolers went very smoothly this year, which is my 11th.
In preparation for working through the Linux From Scratch book, we were able to get everyone familiarized with the macOS Terminal / Windows Command Prompt on their own computers, basic file and navigation commands, scripting, man pages, and wildcards.
They researched other OS's of their choice for a comparison and a simple family tree, learned how to flash a debian-live iso to a USB drive, got to know their UEFI interface, and by the end of the day everyone had successfully booted their computer to Debian off of USB (except our one Macbook M1 student who I've provided a virtual machine with UTM).
#SummerHonorsProgram #GiftedEducation #Linux #LinuxFromScratch #Nebraska
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Well, that's *fun*. I am teaching a summer high school CS program in Holdrege, NE again this year, and the topic is "Linux from Scratch".
I wanted to make sure I remembered the process for creating a LiveUSB stick to use for the students' computers. I have been banging my head for a day and a half trying to figure out why my thumb drive absolutely refused to boot from UEFI on my laptop.
Turns out the drive has some kind of on-chip flag marking it as a fixed disk rather than a removable one, and my laptop's UEFI is specifically incapable of booting from fixed USB. Tried another slower stick and it worked fine, as did booting by switching to Legacy BIOS mode for the faster stick. At least I'm figuring this out ahead of time!