Balmacewen's Kidscon 2016.

The first thing that caught my eye as I walked into the crowded hall, was the flashing lights everywhere. Slipping between green, gold and maroon red, they dangled from the nametags of the many bouncing kids. “Whaaaa?” I stood there staring at the many things dotted around the room. Folded barriers blockaded the way, slapbang in the middle of the hall, loudly proclaiming “KIDSCON 2016”. On a bench setup near the wall, a pair of Samsung virtual reality glasses lay casually as if they were an everyday object, not something amazing enough to warrant the group of twelve year-olds staring in awe at them. Crowds stood all over the room, excitedly making guesses at what the day would hold.

After securing myself a glowing nametag (a tricky job involving sticky tape and lithium batteries)

I joined the group on the floor as we waited for the oncoming speeches.

After short introductions to our mentors for the day, and a long motivational speech, we were sent on our way (in groups) to our first activity. For my group, that was Scratch. I had heard of Scratch before, but never thought of it as anything more than a basic programing game for five year-olds. Boy was I proven wrong. To start with, we had to draw a ‘sprite’ on the computer. That was interesting given we all had mouse pads on our computers. Then we had to program it. This was the best part as it was like actual coding, only you had no brackets. Instead you have brightly coloured sections that you could drag and drop different commands into. The commands were like ones that I have used before, like if/else options.

After a short morning tea, we moved onto robotics. I had done a bit of the robot programming before, but most of the group hadn’t. We had the little Eve robots with colour sensors.

When programming a robot you drag blocks with commands in them, like Scratch, but a whole level harder. After completing a couple of easy challenges, we got to the really fun stuff. We had to program the robot to buzz around a green square, except whenever it hit a colour lighter than green, we had to make it swivel on the spot and keep going in the opposite direction, until it hit another light area. That was hard. Very hard. But we did it, and even programmed it to follow a black line marked in tape on the floor. It produced the greatest feeling of satisfaction in the whole afternoon.

Next on the schedule was GPU. A bit like Photoshop, we had to draw an image on the computer. Again. The pictures were confined to a very limited range of simple shapes, like a smiling face or an eye blinking. After drawing the original picture we added a layer with the same image on it, but we could erase and change things without affecting the original. We then created more of the same with slight changes to each picture, before finally animating them to create the effect of movement.

Lastly we had HTML and CSS 101. HTML is the skeleton of the web, the basic structure. CSS was described as the frosting on the cake, or the decorated, animated and pretty face that people see. This station was a highlight for most people as we got to change the profile pictures of the staff to pictures of cats. We also got to go through the code for an animated picture, and fix the errors to make it work.

I think the standout of KidsCon for me was robotics, not to mention the jellybeans and chocolate that we received in the goody-bags. But I think everyone had something different that they loved that day, and something that they were left wanting to pursue in the future.

Kitty Dawes