More than 60 kids from 9 to 13 participated at this years FrogLab workshops at FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The demand was so high that many interested kids had to be rejected as the group would have gotten too big to ensure that they’d be supervised responsibly.
As announced, the FSFE supported the project financially and with manpower. Unfortunately, it was only me at the end who actually found his way to FroSCon to help in person.
Most kids arrived on Friday afternoon, but as I joined them on Saturday morning, I can only report from the last two days of the event. It started with a quick introduction to the command line. The kids were divided into three groups for this. After lunch they could choose which workshop to attend:
The Blender group during the introduction
- programming Freedroidz robots
- programming game with Python
- creating animated 3D movies with Blender
Although I attended a few Freedroidz workshops in the past, I was assigned to the Blender group. As I haven’t had a look at Blender before, I had the pleasure to learn the basics of this feature rich Free Software just like all the other participants in the group from our twelve year old tutor, Robin.
It was a lot of fun to work with this group of interested bright kids and youths and watch them learn.
Exercise on the bouncing castle
As a dad of two kids myself, I was remarkably impressed by the organizers that they striclty enforced breaks with exercises, provided a lot of fresh fruits and prohibited all kinds of candy, period.
On Sunday afternoon, the results of the three workshops were presented to the whole group together with the parents who came just for that. The other two workshops were also tutored by kids. According to the results presented, they’ve done a very good job as well. I’ll try to get some of the many pictures that were taken during the presentation to add them here. Until then, you may have a look at Teckids e. V. for a report of the event which is supposed to show up there soon.
First steps with Blender
After all that work the organizers spent to make this aweome event so succesfull, we can’t begrudge them a little break for a few weeks. 🙂
If you want to support the Teckids e.V, please let us know! The next similar event is already planned for OpenRheinRuhr in November this year. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend that one, but this was definetely not the last Froglabs for me!