This is a guest post written by Angie Kalthoff, Technology Integrationist for the St. Cloud School District. Do you need a scholarship to attend a conference? Check out our Scholarships page!
The first day of Picademy was spent learning about the Pi, tinkering with program starters, and getting to know the people around us. We had time to work together on projects of interest and time to work alone.
I demystified stop lights by learning how to write a program using Python to create my very own stop light!
Day two of Picademy allowed us to gather in groups with a similar goal. My group had a goal of using a sensor, camera, and live streaming a video.
Our team project. Our goals were to write a program to trigger a camera situated by an office door, to turn on based on motion and live stream a video of who was at the door. We thought this would be helpful to see who is at the door even when we are not physically able to be there. We also thought it might prompt conversations with colleagues on how we created it thus allowing us to talk about computer science and computational thinking.
We learned that the sensor was very sensitive and that it was triggered to be on at all times. We then decided to create a button that people could push to turn the camera on. We were able to get our program to work to the point of getting the camera to work by touching a button but we were not able to live stream it in the amount of time we had.
Our group split into two focuses. We had people who worked on creating the structure to house the camera and a group who worked on creating the code. While I was drawn to wanting to create the structure (something that I have more have experience with), I pushed myself to work through the code (an area that I have just started tinkering in).
At the end of our allotted time, we were able to share our work with our peers in Picademy. We did a live demo of what we had accomplished so far, talked about our path to get where we were, and what we would like to do if we had more time.
Picademy was a great experience. While it was only two days, a quick two days, I had a lot of hands-on time to tinker with the Pi and think about how I could bring it into classrooms. My biggest take away is that when the project has a real connection to the creator, it is easier to push through the frustrations. I really wanted to create a spinning shoe rack on the first day of the Picademy. My real life need caused to me to work through my frustrations instead of giving up… but that is a whole other blog post.