[OLPC-Chicago] pycon youth track

[Mel Chua]

We can plug PyCon at our bootcamps and presentations this summer - one 
of those "if you work on a really awesome project and want to show it 
off at X, here's what you can do" (and have a group of mentor-types 
standing for the next 11 months to catch any kids who want to prep 
something - basically, anything - for PyCon, to present).

Larry, maybe your summer camp crew can do something here? IMSA folks?

I think it would be great to have two types of things for this track - 
presentations *for* kids, and presentations *by* kids. (Of course, the 
two can coincide a lot, and there's no reason that things that kids work 
on won't be relevant to the general pycon population - witness the 
awesome productivity and depth of knowledge of some of the youngest 
PyCon participants this year.)

Maybe a "playroom" with laptops (XOs, normal desktops, etc) with games 
created in Python featured on the laptops, and forms (at a few different 
literacy levels - a 12 year old can probably write up things in more 
detail than a 4 year old) for bug reports / feature requests? You're 
never too young to be a tester...

Definitely some hardware-interfacing-with-Python demos - 
pyusb/pyserial/pyparallel/etc make it super easy to do shiny pythonic 
things with gadgets, and Arjun Sarwal has integrated sensors with the 
XO's Measure activity, plus TurtleArt.

Sheila, is there a wiki page we should be dumping these ideas on? ;)

-Mel

sheila miguez wrote:
> Hi group,
> 
> There is talk in the pycon organizers list for having a youth-focused
> track at PyCon next year (and in the future)
> 
> It seems to me this group would be a natural resource for volunteering
> and planning such a thing, so I want to see ideas from people here for
> projects.
> 
> I'd love to see ideas for participants ranging from 3rd grade to
> older, for all levels of literacy and numeracy. brainstorm and we can
> pare down the list later.
> 
> I definitely want to help, and will volunteer to work logistics and do
> leg work. I would like for people with good speaking skills so that we
> can plan recruiting sessions. I envision taking some OLPCs to a school
> or to a community center and drumming up interest to encourage people
> to apply to go to PyCon next year.
>