The Minecraft Club

Tristan's Minecraft Club has been happening at the Wilton Library for over a year now.   We meet every Saturday morning and playdates often follow.  We have a group of regulars and new people trying it out every week.  The library has had to cap participants to 25 and we have a waiting list.  It has been a great fun start to our weekends.

So this is Tristan with a couple of his buddies that have been coming to the club for over a year.

It has been interesting observing these children play.  We went for a long stretch without girls and now we have around 8 who come regularly. The boys are louder and like to play "seek and destroy" games.

The girls are busy creating "machines" and villages.  Of course there is a lot of crossover too and everyone seems to have a great time.

We have also played around with table configuration and have decided a particular layout is most enjoyed. The children like to sit in groups so we have 4 tables of 6-7 kids.

We have a craft table now also to design and make pixel art with wooden blocks.

Tristan has also started a new Minecraft related programming course at Youth Digital.  I am a strong believer in not just playing games, but creating them.  This course is called Mod Design 1.




Children are taught how to make their own swords, food, and other Minecraft elements (called "mods") using Javascript.  It is a course designed for children aged 8-14 and it is the 4th course we have taken with this wonderful little company from North Carolina.  Check them out here.  I purchased this program from the Homeschoolers Buyers Co-op at a substantial discount.

(I am not being paid to plug these companies but I highly recommend them)

We will be continuing to host the Club through May and then we will have to make a decision about whether to hand it over to other enthusiastic parents to host it over the summer.

Cooking in French

This year we have a wonderful French teacher, Elhem, coming to our house once a week to speak French (only) with my children.

Tristan asked to have French lessons and I found a teacher who lives nearby.  Tristan has convinced Elhem to teach him how to bake French recipes.  Today they are baking financier. These are little almond and raspberry cakes.  He is having to measure everything in grams and all the wonderful things that baking involves.  Tristan has quite a list of all the things he wants to bake!  Next week they are making creme brûlée.  He doesn't realize he is learning French as he bakes; he just thinks that he is having fun.

Claire has started a 4 year French course with the Potter School online, which terminates with the French AP exam. The class includes all of the grammar and conversation but the teachers are not native speakers and Claire needs to be able to converse in French with her Grandparents about all of the things she is interested in.  Elhem challenges her to talk about herself and clarifies the grammar rules so that she can speak confidently.

The Potter School specializes in providing rigorous courses for homeschooled children.  They have a large selection of classes and I thought we would try some out this year (Adobe Photoshop and French). Her French class is well organized, live! and she has 12 other classmates.   There is a screen that serves as a blackboard.  The students can hear everything and contribute either through their microphones or through a text feature.  It doesn't feel like a classroom environment and is definitely not as social as a regular class.  Claire's feeling is that online classes are OK, but she wouldn't want to do all of her classes online (even if she can do them in her pajamas.)  We did however meet Claire's teacher when she recently visited Connecticut and Claire has met all of the other students learning French at the Potter School in our area. So far it has been working out well for us.

Sound of Music

A highlight of our year has been the children's performance of The Sound of Music.  Both Claire and Tristan had roles, Claire as the Mother Abbess and Tristan as Kurt (one of the children) and Rolf.  Both of them love acting and have been taking singing lessons.  I thought I'd add a couple of clips from the performance.

Firstly, here is Tristan playing Rolf and singing "I Am Sixteen"!

We have had a wonderful time at The Studio and look forward to doing musicals again with them next year.

Mother's Day Pi

Front

For this Mother's Day I purchased this for myself.   It's a computer.  Tiny and so so cool.  I miss the days when I used to tinker with computers, pull them apart and add little upgrades here and there.  I enjoy the challenges of getting myself out of a technological hole by watching youtube videos. I use predominantly the trial and error method to learn.  I need to be fixing problems to have the resilience to climb steep learning curves. My brain enjoys the challenge.

I am still coming down off the high of the Maker Faire. And when Dale, the techie at the library showed me his Raspberry Pi displaying the library's catalog system, I couldn't resist testing it out for myself.

The computer is around $35. It is a little green motherboard with a bunch of ports to plug things into it.  I have monitors, keyboards, USB hubs etc around the house to plug into it.  My challenge is to set up Minecraft in Linux and play it on the Raspberri Pi.

Armed with Raspberry Pi for Dummies and an SD card, I set about making a boot disk card with Raspbian Wheezy (Raspberry Pi Linux for beginners) on it....which led me on a little journey in fixing line errors in Python (rather intimidating).  I then abandoned Python and went with Dan on Youtube.  He had a nice slow English accent that gave me confidence.  After many trials and errors, I booted up my new little computer.



It takes a little getting used to.  It is like a PC from 10 years ago without all of the annoying pop up windows and messages.  It's a basic, yet very usable little computer.    I feel like I have entered a new little world.  Instead of Google, for example, I use Midori and Duckduckgo to search the internet.  Cute names everywhere.

I am excited about it. I want to see what it can do: experiment!  I am going to push my envelope with code and find reasons to use it/write it and not be intimidated by it.  I am going to teach my children to set up their own Raspberry Pi's.  I might even hold a tech class next year in preparation for the Maker Faire.

This is such a fun project for a tinkerer like me and a great present for kids interested in technology.

Happy Mother's Day!









... Minecraft was a piece of cake to run on Raspberry Pi.  It is not the same version as on the Mac and I couldn't play it in full screen mode. Yet Tristan was quite delighted with it and now wants his own Raspberry Pi.

Museum of Natural History

Our archaeological dig is just around the corner and to prepare we usually go to a museum in NYC with Geof Pursell, affectionately known as Big Dog.  As we are researching the Maya, he chose the American Museum of Natural History as the museum with the best representation of Maya artifacts in our vicinity.  We were a group of 8 families, all excited to hear what Geof had to tell us.

Geof communicates using stories.  He was trying to help us understand the world view of the Maya. The Maya were a very successful civilization lasting 4000 years.  They developed a powerful way of helping people deal with the uncertainty in their lives.   The Maya developed a fascinating culture and belief system, the nuggets of which Geof shared with us, enthralling us with stories of smoke snakes, piles of childrens' bones and giant canoes.  Such great stories!  Geof helped us make sense of what we were seeing in the museum and to construct the story of how it must have been so many years ago. He teaches us to think like an archaeologist.

Dig Preparation

We are preparing for our next Dig experience which will take place early May.  We have already visited the University of Pennsylvania to see the Maya 2012 exhibit, had a special Maya history tour of the American Museum of Natural History with archaeologist Geof Pursell and watched a bunch of documentaries.  To complete our dig preparation I wanted to make a giant timeline with the kids depicting the time periods and make a large topographical map of the area.

This was an opportunity not just to learn about the Maya culture but to practice research skills. It was fun (and a little exhausting) and such a gorgeous day that we all hung out on the verandah afterwards and relaxed.

Mini-Maker Faire

We had a great day out at the Maker Faire yesterday.  It was a stunning spring day and people came out in force to see the exciting things that people had made.   For me, the day was the culmination of our year-long tech class led by Paul Chayka from Robotics and Beyond.  In the class the children had come up with something they wanted to make.   Finally the day had come for the kids to show the world what they had made.

Claire decided she wanted to make a tracking dog collar.  The prototype was equipped with a GPS system, to track the location of the dog and a screen that displays your phone number along with the dog’s name.   It was a complicated project with many components, which all had to be connected on a bread board and a basic stamp micro controller.  Claire wrote the program on Paralax.

The children had plenty of opportunity to share what they had made with the community.  Thousands of people came by during the day, and it was fun to catch up with old friends and other homeschoolers who came by and hung out with us.

Maker Faires are inspirational places. I loved wondering around getting ideas for future projects. I might just have to get a 3D printer!

Tristan's idea was to make a lego Minecraft terrain and a remote controlled robot with a claw that would pick up lego pieces and move them around the board.  He had fun sharing his project (for a while) before the lure of all the projects going on around him were too much to resist.

I couldn't wipe the smile off Tristan's face all the way home in the car!  It was a great day.