KidsTek students at five Aurora middle schools are busy after school learning a wide variety of computer skills through our fun and engaging computer projects.
Long-time KidsTek instructor Courtney Wade teaches two groups of students at Mrachek Middle School— both a beginner and advanced class. The two groups are currently working on a new project that Courtney has introduced where the students are creating their own class newspaper! This project helps the students learn the importance of research, interviewing skills, and both basic and advanced formatting in Microsoft Word.
Steve Kessler, another veteran KidsTek instructor, teaches for us at South Middle School and Aurora West College Preparatory Academy. Steve is currently teaching a program called Scratch, where students get an interactive, hands-on introduction to computer programming. Scratch allows for students to program their own characters, called sprites, and create an interactive world where their sprites become part of a video game that the students have designed themselves. Each student in Steve’s classes has created very original gaming worlds using this program, and we can’t wait to see the final product!
Instructor Alanna Hernandez teaches our after school class at North Middle School where the students recently created a “KidsTek Mall.” The students used Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel to create fictional businesses they would like to run in a mall setting. Alanna also teaches for us at East Middle School where she held timed relay races for the students which generated data that the students then charted in Excel spreadsheets. The students learned how to make different kinds of graphs and how to change the formatting so that they could tailor them to their specific tastes. Alanna also taught her students how to use the mathematical functions within Excel such as Auto Sum and averaging to tabulate and analyze the scores of each event.
Through creative, project-based lesson planning, KidsTek instructors are able to introduce even advanced software functions to younger students.
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