On August 16th and 17th 40 students from 19 different schools enjoyed 2 days of coding as one part of the Young Business School Summer Camp. The students aged 8 to 17 years were the first ones to work with the new SAP Young Thinkers LEARN modules for Coding with SNAP! and Explore IoT (with an Adaptive Front Lighting Model and data upload to HCP).
On the first day the coding workshop with gamified SNAP! took place in an former factory loft in Ludwigsburg. The so called ‘discushion loft’ offers a completely new classroom experience with plenty of space and room for creativity. As first warm up the students even could shape their classroom for the day by arranging the rainbow colored pillows the way they liked and needed it.
Working with the SAP Young Thinkers ‘flying classroom’ a set of laptops which allow coding everywhere and anytime and inspired by the open and creative atmosphere all students started to code their own little app and game. The results were very diverse and all impressive. Every team created an own little app according to their own ideas and phantasy.
The students were absolutely absorbed by building different point and click -, reaction time and simple jump and run games as well as by designing their game characters. It was nearly impossible to entice them away from their laptops, even when pizza was offered for lunch. ‘I don’t need lunch I would like to finish my app’, ‘I wish our classroom would look like this’, ‘How can I continue to code at home ?’ are just some of the student quotes highlighting their passion for coding.
In conclusion of the workshop, we were glad to visit a 3D-printing student start-up showing a home-made drone - a practical hardware related coding application as perfect transition to the hardware based IoT workshop on the next day.
After a short introduction into the world of IoT, students started to build their own hardware. A microcontroller was connected with LEDs and a potentiometer acting as a model for an adaptive front lighting system. It was even shown how the data collected with their own little IoT module can be uploaded to HCP which was really impressive.
Although many students made their first programming experiences only on the previous day, controlling the hardware with a SNAP! script worked fast and simple. The students even started developing extensions for the predefined module and enthusiastically picked up on ideas like an IoT alarm system for their youth rooms.
The final feedback was extremely positive and the detailed feedback of the target group helped to fine-tune the new learning modules to be a perfect fit for upcoming workshops.
Best Regards
Claudia, Jadga, Marc, Miriam, Christiane