Andrés at Joensuu

Saturday was last Scifest day, where Joensuu families were invited to come over to Areena and enjoy the activities we had prepared for Finnish schools. While it took me a while to wake up on Saturday, it seems I was not the only one, as people took their time before they started filling Areena.

Once there, I discovered that the people from aero-modelism group were my stand neighbours. I had to admit that their planes were cool, but you cannot actually do anything with them, as you can with Alice. But kids and parents going to their stand read the poster I prepared, and eventually came in to play with Alice.

This time kids came with their parents, who also showed some interest in Alice and asked for references on how to get Jeliot. Funny thing is that they were asking for the selling price of Alice, they were happy they could get it for free. Some teachers and parents got also a look to the books I had and asked about the availability. Amazon has them.

At some stage I had to “fight” with really silent kids. But Erkki’s kids, thanks Tuulli and Martti, were around the stand at that time, and helped me in making them speak and enjoy Alice. In turn, I had to show Alice to their mother :)

Finally, Carolina’s game, SciMyst, also brought kids to the workshop, some of them even reported that Alice was the best thing from Scifest, yay!

Webpages with the content created by kids are coming soon, as well as pictures from the workshop, hopefully later tonight.

Having a dinner and sauna at the moment with some staff from the scifest. The feeling is quite good, after the storm comes the quietness. even tomorrow we expect whole joensuu to visit us at scifest.

now it’s time to share some war stories amongst us. We all agree technologies dont have any misteries for kids.

See you tomorrow!

Morning started quietly, and I took the opportunity ot visit the African village, the guys from Pohjois Karjalan Afrikaan Seura made a good job in bringing Africa to Finland. They are having presentations from real Africans :) or Finns that just got into the wrong dress!

At my workshop I finally got girls to create their games, actually there were more girls than boys. I didn’t managed to get the focused on finishing any, but at least one of them create a wonderful movie that I will post at the same place http://cs.joensuu.fi/jeliot/alice …

Also interesting, some kids are coming back to create more games, and they do remember how to do it… Kids are indeed smart, and Alice works!

I’ll post pictures, I promise!

Ok, so it has happen twice today. Kids had to go back to school while in the middle of their “programming”, nothing you can do. I want to believe this is because schools want to bring more kids this way to Scifest.

After lunch I had less kids playing around, but still some of them manage to create their worlds, unfortunately they did not save them and left running …

Girls are just avoiding computers, as still no one has played with Alice.

Time for lunch after the first session. Things have go pretty slick, better than I expected, with groups of kids coming and making their own games and movies. Some of them finished, some of the m didn’t. I will post the worlds and movies they have created at http://cs.joensuu.fi/jeliot/alice/.

Two (un)surprising facts. Not a single girl and no one read the manual (RTFM!) I created. It was not that bad!!

Pictures coming later!

I will have a stand in the coming SciFest organized by the department. I have been running behind the schedule, but now I have ready some material for the kids to design and create their own 3D games and movies.

The workshop is kind of unofficial as it was too late to have people registering, but I hope to collect kids who want to play with Alice during the festival. So if you read this, please come to my stand and say hi!

I was getting nice feedback from the Alice Community in a message I left there some time ago. I want to thank Chuck who sent my two of the books he has written about Alice, and that served me well when I was piloting Alice with some kids.

The kids turned out to be a strange pair, one kid with a lot of experience, and one kid which did not talk much. I hope this behavior does not reproduce tomorrow with the new kids!