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-makey/4353144/

Thanks so much for your participation! Feel free to pass this along to potentially interested people.

Christine