Thanks A Million. Training started well

Yesterday our workshop in Dream A Dream Computer program started well. A good start is job half done. I should thank all of you who contributed to my presentation, it's a collective team work indeed. Vishal, Madan, EmptyMind, Ranjith, NagaVijay and host of other frens refined the presentation to make it a small bite for those kids to easily assimilate. The ice breaker session was with playing of a smal video clip from Finding Nemo movie, gave us the blitzkreig start. I could not have asked for more concentration from kids after that. Till then, it was a noisy scene of kids shouting all around and with that video playing, all got into pin drop silence, not just kids, but all my frens and volunteers in the workshop too. Then we started explaining them that those pictures in that animated video was made in computer similar to how we draw in paper, and hence the importance of paint as an application. I didn't drive home that point very well, but my team lead in this work Vishal came to our rescue. He is brilliant in explaining stuffs to kids, he did it very neatly. Repetitive yet subtle way of teaching is important. 

 

Before starting the paint, We asked the kids to come to white board and draw their favotire picture. Priya, a 8 year old kid in the group came first, drew the picture of Nemo, the fish. It was with so much details; believe me, not even the aquiline in body of fish was missed. She was explaining the various parts of the fish to her fellow mates. Amazing kid. Training went as planned, couldn't cover the most parts of the presentation. Making kid to do what we want is time consuming and my initial presentation would have taken days to complete :-). We went with drawing a simple picture in the paint, smiley picture and colored it. Two kids were experts among them, after finishing their exercise in the PC, went on to explain how to draw in Laptop with that touchpad mouse. Kids are quick learners indeed, we should be confident in introducing something new to them always. Another important stuff is to plan the whole session in kid's level. Plan it well and should be down to earth. It took almost an hour to train them in drawing simple picture, saving their file, close the application and open the file again. Followed it with one more video observatory quiz to get back their attention. The big exercise was to draw a house with squares, rectangle and color it. One hilarious moment : one kid drew a house with two windows, but both the windows were colored differently. My team mate asked the kid for the reason of two color window, he said "Aunty, one window is closed, another is open, and the second color you are seeing is the color of the inner room". Amazing creativity, isn't it?

 

The basic value with which we went for training are

[+] We should nurture kid's creativity throughout the training and shouldnt curtail it with any force

[+] The best teacher for kids are themselves. When a group of kids see an energetic kid, they all get that energy and enthusiasm. So try to involve kids in teaching their fellow mates. 

 

Hope we stood with that values till the end. Earlier, my fren started with Introduction to computers, that was the first session. She is brilliant in quizzing the kids and keep their attention. Few kids in the group knew what computer is before itself and rest all were beginners. The mouse trainer game (the link is http://www.rekenwonder.com/mousetrainer.htm )helped in training those kids with left click, right click, double click, drag and drop. Started with keyboard training too in the first session. All went well, and now we all are looking forward for next weekend to be with the kids again. Lovely weekend, we couldn't ask for better day than this. Thanks a million to Dream A Dream!

 

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