Erica and Outreach

Erica the Rhino’s use in Outreach

This summer has been a busy one. I have been planning my wedding and also working with Marlands on goRhino. GoRhino is an awesome project, which aims to promote Rhino conservation. It meant that the University of Southampton’s bought an empty Rhino and the fab Erica team made it alive through using Raspberry Pi’s. My Raspberry Pi expertise doesn’t go much beyond setting it up and doing some very simple Python code but I helped promote the Rhino to the local schools. Erica the rhino really worked for outreach. I invited local schools to the university for an intro to pi’s session. It was good for them to see how people from the Uni used them for something as strange as Rhino. The students seemed to take to the sessions quite well and were very engaged. They are all coming back this academic year for a full on Python day.

The goRhino project had a HQ based in Marlands. They were kind enough to go to the shop twice a week and set up a Pi table to engage the local community pi’s and programming. This was great. Over the summer I introduced 402 kids to Raspberry Pi’s – 190 boys and 212 girls. The age group that came to the shop were mainly 0-7 year olds. So this age group was more drawn to Scratch rather than Python! In general I had an average of 10-12 minutes with each child, so they wanted something quick and easy to do. Scratch seemed to fit the bill as everyone liked making a cat explode (yes that is seriously what they did). Out of those 402 – I had 50 children (24 girls and 26 boys) return to me on subsequent weeks to show me their progress on Scratch. This was positive and inspiring. For each child that came along, I made sure they showed their parents what they had achieved at the end of the session. They were told about programming, downloading scratch at home and a mini lesson on Raspberry Pi’s. There were differences between girls and boys. Girls needed more encouragement to explore and experiment with the Pis, where as the boys were not scared of ‘going for it’. After the initial introduction activity of making cats explode they were given the option of making a game (either a maze game or a ping pong game). The boys were more likely to want to do this where as the girls wanted to go back to look at the rhinos or do the colouring in. Girls were more likely to agree to doing the extension activity if their parents had shown enthusiasm in the activity, where as this mattered less for the boys. Overall, parents were a massive factor in these sessions as they were always accompanied by parents. If parents used the computer sessions as a ‘baby sitting activity’ then the kids were less engaged – however if the parents were interested in what their children were learning about there was a better response from the children. Girls picked up on their parents interest much more than the boys. Doing these sessions were an absolute delight. Especially when children threw tantrums because they wanted to do my activity and they had to go home! You can find out more about the goRhino project here. You can find out more about Erica here. For enquiries about outreach, women in computing all at the University of Southampton email:
Reenapau@gmail.com