It’s all fun and games until the fire department shows up.
Teachers and RTP staff had to prod hundreds of students to get them out the doors, even with the fire alarm going off and the ceiling sprinklers spraying down a few yards away. Some say it all started when overzealous students began ‘studying’ frisbee flight a little too close to the sprinklers. But whatever the cause, when kids don’t want to leave a science event, that’s the sign that things were going pretty well!
The event was put on by US2020 RTP, a mentorship-based program that aims to inspire young North Carolinians to pursue STEM careers. As a program that recognizes that minority and immigrant youth remain terribly underrepresented in these fields, Code the Dream was happy to be asked to participate.
Code the Dream Lead Instructor Ramiro Rodriguez brought in an Arduino, an open-source prototyping platform in order to give the kids a taste of how simple code can be used to interact with objects in the “real world.” Our team was really impressed with the students’ curiosity and desire to understand how things worked.
And the kids kept coming by the hundreds… right up until the alarm sounded, the sprinklers started spraying, and the lady by the elevators started yelling “This is not a drill!”
Ramiro shows how easy it can be to code an Arduino, an open-source prototyping platform.