Build2Learn for kids ?

Today I got to visit a codeathon for kids at thinkdiffskool.com. It was a one-week event held in Chennai after which on the last day they conducted a codeathon.
I was lucky to be invited by Bhuvana to help out the children with the codeathon. I was completely blown by the wit the enthusiasm these kids showed for making games, apps, and websites.
The codeathon started at 10:00 AM and ended at 5:00 PM. Here’s a step by step list of what was done today.

1. Creating teams

By far the most difficult task as children tends to change their minds every 5 minutes regarding what project and which team they want to work with.
Bhuvana was having her hands full in forcing them to stick with one project.

2. Start the project

Now that they decided what they wanted to do, they now had to settle on the programming language/framework on which they wanted to work on.
The following were quite popular among the kids

MIT App Inventor
Scratch
Python – Tkinter
Python – PyGame
Js – P5.js
HTML, CSS

3. Code

This was one of the most intense coding sessions I’ve seen in a while. I don’t get to see such passion for building things among most of our college students.
The students had to be forced to stop their projects and leave for lunch.
Not a single student left the room for the mini-break that was given to them. Each one of them were on a mission – To build something awesome!

4. Presentations

Each student had to come with their teams and present their ideas.
It was a fun filled session where scores of laughter would be heard every two minutes.
Here are the amazing applications that we built today.