We're almost at the end of CSTUY SHIP's first journey. The Shipmates and stewards will be showing off their work in another day or so and I'm excited to see their finished projects. But what toolset are they using. With knew we would be working with two rooms of relative beginners. We needed something that allowed us to develop the shipmates CS skills while also having a low cost of entry.

We've got a few more topics to cover in the Building a SHIP series. We still have to cover: The Crew Curricular Choices The long term plan Site and funding But for today, we'll talk outreach. Outreach proved to be particular challenge for SHIP. Our entire crew is made up of teachers. That meant that we couldn't communicate with schools during business hours. That made things particularly tough. I could send emails after hours or set up emails to be sent at specific times during the day, but we couldn't call while at our day jobs.

The Stewards:

It's been a while since my last post. That's mostly since I've getting things ready for this announcement. I've talked about our non-profit CSTUY before. Well, we've been hard at work getting things together for our first summer program: SHIP - Summer Hackers Immersion Program We're really excited about this - taking our years of experience teaching kids at our schools and taking it to a wider audience. SHIP is being hosted at St.

Our hackers have been coming down to SumAll every Saturday for a while now. It’s a great space and we’ve been given run of the office. That said, the hackers really had no idea what SumAll is all about. Today, we had our first guest speaker. Davin Chew, founder and CTO of SumAll. Davin’s also a member of the StuyCS family, he was my student back in the nineties. When Davin heard we needed space for our Saturday program, he and the SumAll team graciously offered to host.

Back to school last Thursday after almost two week off. Twenty four hours later - Snow Day. I know this sounds a bit hokey, but I really would have rather had school. I love a good snow day as much as the next guy, but after a big vacation, I was really ready to get back to work with the kids. Saturday, hacking sessions were set to resume. Being in Manhattan, getting around was pretty easy but we’ve got hackers from all over the city from Staten Island to the Bronx.

Week 5. Last week, I lamented over the difficulties with only meeting once a week. We went over a log of new material last week and I was happy when today rolled around and the hackers would be able to start putting things together. When writing a web app, you’ve got to know about all sorts of things - for us it’s HTML, CSS, Python, and the microframework, flask. That’s quite a bit, particularly when working with a group with a wide range of experience coming in.