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[Steve Garmanian] The students who attend are motived, they’re enthusiastic, and they
want to learn. And you can just see them lighting up with ideas.
[Jack Straub] My students are motivated by a variety of things. Some of them just curiosity,
some of them have already dabbled in programming a little bit.
[Leslie Rome-Nagata] We have a very strong technology focus and we offer a writing component
to the program. So we offer a writer’s workshop, we’ve offered screenwriting, and we’ve
offered classes that are not remedial but are designed to really strengthen a student’s
writing abilities if they’re feeling a little less confident.
[Steve Garmanian] How do you get writing prompts out of for instance, going to the University
of Washington Greenhouses? And what happens is that we can go ahead and approach natural
history or the biological sciences or art, or the sculptures around campus, the gargoyles,
every one of these elements has prompts that we can use for writing. And it’s amazing
today when we put together our anthology at the end of class how the difference paths
students found - every one of them found a path using one of those prompts to produce
a phenomenally cool piece of writing.
[Jack Straub] My class is approximately one-quarter girls. The girls seem to enjoy the class just
about as much as the guys do. Most programming language courses you will start right off
learning nitty bitty details and all sorts of boring stuff. We start this class right
off with what we call turtles. It’s a drawing program. The students learn to program turtles,
how to draw circles and squares and houses and trees. And so they sort of jumped right
into the interesting stuff.
[Steve Garmanian] I think one of the things about the class that’s really important
is that the students come to see themselves as writers. And there’s a lot of validation
that comes out through the program. I think it changes their way of seeing themselves.
[Jack Straub] I find that the students in this class learn an awful lot of things that
they didn’t expect to learn in addition to java. In the two weeks that they’re here,
they learn about what an adult would learn in a very serious class in three or four days.
[Leslie Rome-Nagata] They come away with very specific skills in some instances. In other
cases, they come away from an experience that was that was just maybe really, really fun.
[Jack Straub] The kids learn an awful lot of things in class. They learn to interact
with each other. They learn to write programming languages. They have a good time.
[Steve Garmanian] You have kids without exception who are there to learn, who really desire
to push the boundaries in terms of what their used to and how they’re expected to perform.
They readily buy in to very challenging material. So it’s extremely gratifying and it just
kind of fills my spirit. And I really think that it’ll change the way they see the world
and assist them with they’re writing when they return to high school in the fall.