RCET is excited to welcome campers to the Golden Flashes Jr STEAM Team. Across the camp the children will explore several digital tools for robotics, coding, and design that are designed to promote children's engagement with concepts and skills for STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, & mathematics). Campers kicked-off their first day with ChatterPix, a free iOS app that can be used to animate an object within a photo so that it can “talk”.Children are able to draw a mouth on an object in a photo and then record their voiceover. The object’s mouth then animates and moves in relation to the sound waves of the voice recording. 
Next, the campers created their own digital stories using. Toontastic 3D, a free Google tool for creating animated stories. The Toontastic 3D platform offers characters, templates and backgrounds that children can use to draw, create, and animate 3D stories and cartoons. The template guides children through the writing process to create an animated story that includes story elements for character, setting, problem, and solution. Children are able to add audio to their stories by recording their own voices. Using multimodal tools such as Toontastic 3D and ChatterPix provides opportunities for children to further develop their literacy skills for reading, writing, speaking and listening and to also build important skills for critical thinking, creativity, and communication.
Also this afternoon, the campers were introduced to robotics with the LEGO WeDo system. LEGO WeDo combines traditional LEGO bricks with programming software to introduce design thinking and the basic elements of programming to young children. Today campers were introduced to concepts and terms for simple machines such as gear, pulley, wheel, and axle. The campers were also introduced to the LEGO WeDo drag-and-drop software, and the various tools and pieces they will be using to create the project models including the LEGO USB Hub, motor, tilt sensor, and motion sensor. The campers completed a series of initial mini-projects designed to build their understanding of how gears work and to expertise with the programming language.
