Access to hardware and internet are some of the more basic building blocks to developing CS skills. With these tools in hand, students can connect to experts and limitless resources. Many homes in our communities however, still do not have access to a computer or internet. Zero Day Camp is hoping to help close this gap with its newly founded Tech2Learn program.
Through the T2L program, we collect, refurbish, and provide hardware to our partner schools, who in turn provide the hardware to students, for home use. We also help connect students and families to available resources to free and low cost internet as well as other local resources for learning.
Zero Day Camp relies on donations from families, businesses, and other institutions in our community to make this work. To donate, please fill out the form available at this link.
This week we worked with strings to create Thanksgiving Mad Libs. The starter project asks for a part of speech which is saved as a variable. Coders insert the variables into join strings blocks (aka concatenation). Check out the starter project 
Session 3
October 11th is Ada Lovelace Day so let’s celebrate! Ada is known by some to be the first computer programmer, born in 1815. She was an avid mathematician and theorized about computer programs that could be used for purposes beyond mathematics. Her “computer programs” came decades before the first computer known as the “Analytical Engine” which Ada had a hand in developing along with Charles Babbage. To find out more about this special lady, check out this 
Welcome back returning coders and greetings to our newest members! This week we set out to get to know each other and set some large goals for the fall session. We hope to dive deeper and build more complex programs while learning and applying the fundamentals of computer science. Whole class instruction focused on basic sprite navigation using the cartesian plane and rotation angles as they apply to the sprites in their programs. We also looked more closely at creating custom blocks (functions) to generate more elegant code while drawing using the pen tool in Scratch (a nod to Seymour Papert and Logo the Turtle). You can find the instructions we worked off of today by following 
Coders continued working on their badges and gain skills in creating their games. Week 4 focused on cloning sprites. 
This week we rolled out the 
Welcome to the start of the Spring 2016 session. This 6 week session we will be building a game using the Scratch programming language. Each week we will be adding a new level and learning coding concepts such collisions, cloning, using a timer, and jumping (and simple gravity). This first week we got started with general orientation and setting up the game. Next week, we will be working on creating the next level and adding additional functionalities.