Last week, our Hardware Friday workshop was a bit weird: Family Night was over, but this was still session one, and on Monday (5/11) started a new four-week session. Despite this weird place, something wonderful happened. Miriam, Kenwood’s librarian, had another engagement to attend and Amy, Kenwood’s volunteer coordinator who had recently begun working with us, […]
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Apollo
We had just wrapped up K-1 Monday, and I sent the Kids Plus students back to the after-school program after everyone else had been picked up. Remus, Romulus, and Cassandra (not their real names), three of the four helpers I’d had that day, were helping Mrs. Lamb clean up while waiting for the Kids Advisory […]
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Collaborating with IPA at Kenwood’s Tech Time
In January, we started collaborating with the International Preparatory Academy, a bilingual school in its first year that is currently sharing a building with Kenwood Elementary. Kenwood’s own building is having construction done this year, so they and IPA share the old Carey Busey building and IPA will expand into the rest of the building […]
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Antigone: Story from Kenwood
One morning, Mr. Lash brought a new student for her first day coming to Tech Time. “Mr. Travis, this is Antigone” (not her real name). “She’s had breakfast, so she’s good to go.” And with that, he was off. Antigone got right to work on her design document after I explained the process to her, […]
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By Any Other Name…Kenwood Story
My name, Travis, is a little funny to students; at any rate, I get called a lot of funny names by the students. I get Trevor, Trivius, one student even calls me “Doctor Tryorus” (I don’t even know how he came up with that one). Well, one day, Achilles called me “Vitruvius.” My bachelor’s is […]
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A Kenwood Success Story
I was walking down the hall toward the teachers’ lounge one morning, probably to make some copies or something. Miss KJ, the art teacher, greeted me in the hall and asked, “Did you hear about Hypatia (not her real name)?” I said that no, I hadn’t. “Oh, you should ask Jessica about Hypatia,” she said […]
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Craft Tech Fair
“We should have a fair,” Miriam said one day. Of course we should! Why didn’t I think of that? Because I have no idea how to run a fair. Duh. But it was a fantastic idea, so I agreed immediately. Over the next few days, we set a tentative date and started writing down ideas […]
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Of Dinosaurs and Polar Bears — Girls Lead at Kenwood
It was Girls Lead Thursday, and we were running a Scratch storytelling workshop focused on starting our stories right. I had often observed students with rather elegantly scripted stories, involving three or more characters with several lines of dialogue and spanning multiple backgrounds. But when the story was over, they would manually click and drag […]
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Drawing the Internet
Hailley and I showed up on the bus, bright and early, for morning Tech Time. We settled our things and readied a chromecart for the incoming students. As they filed in and grabbed their chromebooks to get to work, they found that the school wi-fi was down. Hailley and I tried to troubleshoot from the […]
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Women in Computer Science — Discussion at Kenwood
Kenwood Tech Time decided to have a “girls only” day. By the most recent formal count (numbers are growing rapidly), we had twelve boys and seven girls at Tech Time. That’s not terrible – but it’s not 50/50. So Miriam (Kenwood’s school librarian) had a few girls make posters to spread around the school announcing Girls’ […]
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