Hello!
This is Christine Hodges. You may or may not know me from the circles I
move in: I'm a former tech worker, hackerspace user,
meetup.com
participant, effective altruism/rationality community adjacent, member of
First Church Berkeley UCC.
So I got a new job teaching technology at an elementary school in Oakland.
I'd like to give my 230+ Transitional Kindergarten through 5th grade
students great, hands-on learning opportunities with electronics and
coding: a STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math). I
have a plan to introduce electronics concepts, bring in physical computing,
then tie that to software coding later in the school year. But I want
students to have hands-on experiences first. This requires stuff like LEDs,
batteries, electronic building blocks, etc.
Thus I started a series of
DonorsChoose.org projects to fundraise for these
class materials.
And guess what: some anonymous donors will match every donation so it cuts
the cost in half! Yay! I think this matching will be available all this
week, maybe longer, but I don't know.
And now I'm asking you if you could please chip in while I have this
matching offer. A $10 donation becomes $20. $100 becomes $200!
3 projects posted, many minds educated...
1) The #1 priority project is the basic electronics components and only
needs $339 to be fully funded:
https://www.donorschoose.org/project/intro-to-circuits/4347772/
2) Electronic building blocks gets students creating at a higher level of
abstraction - needs $221
https://www.donorschoose.org/project/electronic-building-blocks/4348639/
3) Makey Makey devices bridge hardware to software - needs $385
https://www.donorschoose.org/project/from-circuits-to-coding-with-makey-mak…
Thanks so much for your participation! Feel free to pass this along to
potentially interested people.
Christine