Edward Elementary School has taken a revolutionary step to introduce SketchUp to the kids. It is a Tech Camp of a week organized by the school’s parent teacher organization.
Ainsley is a 7 year old student among the 30 participants of the camp. She is very excited to participate in this camp. Her feet don’t even touch the floor when she sit in the chair of her computer lab. The drawing she made in SketchUp may be slinky toy or a macaroni noodles. But the truth is she can handle a program which is essentially a basic computer aided design tool.
"I thought this camp would be fun to go to because it would be learning about the computer," Ainsley said, "and for typing practice. I only know the home-row keys." Ainsley likes Google SketchUp, but she also is a fan of Microworlds.
"I made a butterfly," she said, "and you can make costumes for it, and program how it’s going to fly. You can choose your own backgrounds, like a farm or a flower garden. I chose flower garden."
The camp serves a dual purpose: to introduce children to software programs such as Scratch, Google SketchUp and Garage Band, and to raise money for books for the school’s media center.
"This all came together very quickly," said Jenne Paskach, a PTO volunteer whose middle-school-aged children Dagney and Nathan are helping as student teachers. "While this is only a PTO fundraising project for this school at this point, we’d love to see if it would be successful enough that perhaps the district might consider a citywide project."
Teresa Green, media specialist for Edwards Elementary, is volunteering her time, as are others, to come in and teach the kids about the programs, many of which are free or already available through the school district’s computers. The camp is sponsored by Heartland Area Education Agency and Frontline BioEnergy. Green said the programs introduce the kids to design concepts that allow them to make their own cartoons, 3-D designs, music and more.
While Green and Paskach dole out snacks to the techie campers, Steve Linduska, an education technologist from Heartland AEA, is talking about Ainsley’s Slinky-macaroni image. He explains how her 3-D diagram could apply to the students’ real world, as a new piece of playground equipment instead of one of the old ones the school is currently hoping to replace.
"This looks exactly like something on a playground that a kid could climb or walk through," Linduska said.
With a few clicks of his own computer, he shows the kids how to download shared design files of diverse things like bananas and mountains for use in their own projects.
"You’ve got 20 minutes … go invent something!" Linduska said, as the campers returned to their screens.
Green estimates the fees generated from the camp will buy about $1,000 worth of books for the school’s media center, which has been hit by budget constraints.
If there’s an irony in a computer camp funding book purchases, Green doesn’t see it.
"I don’t think the two are separate entities," she said, "because they are both powerful tools that we use to get information. We are teaching kids to use all these resources to find out about their world."
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