Over the month of June, 13 students from Phoenix Union High School District participated in Coding in Color’s first Summer Coding Camp 2018. The coding camp was held at Alhambra High School in which the students built and broke projects related to Web Development, Electricity and Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence. The course aimed to spark curiosity in Computer Science and to encourage students to consider Computer Science careers. 

The Summer Coding Camp 2018 was broken down into roughly three, one-week modules. The first module students experimented with was Web Development. The second was Electricity and Robotics and the last week was dedicated to Artificial Intelligence.

Jocelyne
Student
My favorite part of this course was building the robot car because we always ran into issues. Running into issues made us want to test things out to observe and discover errors on our own and see how editing certain things in our code changed our car's movements.

The first week, students were introduced to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Students were able to launch their websites on Github Pages and learned about Computer Networking and the TCP/IP Model. This module focused on having students understand how the internet works and how to make a basic website!

Joshwai

Joshwai created a website the first week of the course and learned the basics of HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Here is the product!

Some students have also added a Coding Portfolio section to their websites!

Hugo

Hugo has incorporated a coding portfolio to his website where he highlights some of the projects he worked on this summer. Check out his projects!

Over the second week, students learned about Object Orientated programming with Python as well as an introduction to Electricity and Robotics!

Students built Caesar’s Cipher the past week using JavaScript and remade the Cipher using Python to bridge the connection between the two languages. We then moved over to creating a Social Network with a Network, Users and Posts and we applied mathematical concepts such as the Law of Cosine using Python’s Turtle module. 

The end of the week was dedicated to Electricity and Robotics in which students created circuits and learned about Current, Voltage and Resistance. At the end of the module, students assembled and programmed a small robot. 

Photo drawn by AI Chat Bot - @zochats on Twitter

Over the last week of the Summer Coding Camp, students embarked on one of the most interesting topics: AI. Throughout this module, we discussed philosophical concepts such as intelligence and what it means to be human and machine. We discussed misconceptions of AI, specifically how far we are from Super-Intelligence. 

We moved over to a specific topic of Artificial Intelligence known as Machine Learning. Students learned about Natural Language Processing in which they built their own Google Assistants. One of our students, Angel, is shown to the left with his Assistant, Luna. 

Students also took a morning to play with Google’s AI Experiment Lab to understand the underlying technology of some of the projects (found here https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/ai)

After learning about NLP, we also covered topics such as Neural Networks and even built our very own.

Marilu
Student
My favorite part of this course was learning about AI and robotics. It was very fun and interesting to learn about and I'm probably going to keep looking into it.

We would like to thank all of our donors, sponsors and Carl Hayden Community High School for allowing this program to flourish this summer. Students filled out an exit survey where each question was based on a scale of 1 (least/a little) to 5 (most/a lot). The survey first asked students how much they felt they learned, 92.3% of students voted a 4 or 5. Students were also asked to rate the course in which students gave an average rating of 4.69. Overall, 92.3% of students said they would recommend this course to another student in the future.

Many of the students enjoyed the Electricity and Robotics module, however, due to the lack of funding, the robots that were used malfunctioned often and did not allow students to experiment with reliable robots. The camp was funded with a total of $1,700 which were generously donated by members of the community. Our funds were used towards student stipends and electricity/robotics materials. For our Summer Coding Camp 2019, we will be applying to grants in order to pay for: teacher compensation, robotics materials, laptops, and student stipends. 

If you are interested in sponsoring our camp, please send an email to Diana Lee Guzman: dg2510 AT nyu DOT edu.