Wednesday, March 19, 2014

McPherson Magnet School Career Day

Today R2 and I were invited to McPherson Magnet School for their Career Day. I was to give three presentations to about 800(!) kids total, in grades 2-8.

I arrived about a half hour early for my first presentation at 10:30am, and set up. The lights were dimmed once my presentation began, so that the slide show could be seen more easily.



I prepared two separate presentations, one geared toward the younger students, and another geared toward the older ones. I'm a software engineer, so the beginning of my talk described my education and my job, and then I segued into the discussion about R2, since that's what the kids really wanted to hear about anyway. I also demonstrated the Arduino system and talked about how it's relatively easy nowadays to get started with embedded programming.



Like I say, lots of students! And this was just one of the three presentations.



Since not everyone could see R2, I drove him down the aisles so that they could get a better look and take pictures. To my relief the students were all very well behaved, and R2 survived the excursion with no missing parts.



At the end of each session, I did Q&A. Students were selected by the staff to come up and ask questions, which were all good ones.



I'm really glad I was able to come out, and hopefully students interested in programming and/or robotics will be motivated to pursue such a hobby.

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