I’ve had the pleasure of attending two separate events of “Innovation Day” at Imagine Firestone Charter School. “Innovation Day” is a whole day event where professionals working in many different areas come together to present talks to fifth an sixth graders. I’ve attended this event with my good friend Andrew Koprowski both times and we were happy to give presentations on Conway’s Game of Life, with a focus on minimizing our presentation time and maximizing the time the students got to play with the program, discover what it did and ask questions through engagement.
My favorite part about this event would be hearing the questions the students came up with. We got asked questions about work, our hobbies, being an adult, college, even video games.
Given the chance, I’d go to this event yearly. Having gone twice, I can say each experience was different and worthwhile.
One of the biggest shockers was that these young students already had experience writing HTML, CSS and JS. I remember we had a specific course in school to teach us how to type, and here I am learning these students are learning web development skills so early. I had a blast going and I truly hope more of these “Innovation Days” occur at other schools.
Our presentation can be seen here as a pdf or here as a pptx
Some photos of the events: