“Welcome to NASA, the Newfoundland Amateur Space Agency,” John Barron said to a group of children aged 5-12 seated on the hill facing the Confederation Building outside the College of the North Atlantic (CNA) on Prince Philip Drive Wednesday morning.
Barron is a former teacher and the provincial program co-ordinator for Brilliant Labs, a non-profit group that promotes technology and entrepreneurship through free programs for school-age children.
“My job is the best job in the world. I get paid to play,” Barron said as he set up a rocket launching pad on the side of the hill.
As a celebration of Rocket Day on Aug. 8 — the anniversary of Canada going to space — Brilliant Labs, which partnered with City of St. John’s summer camps, launched bottle rockets. Teams competed for the highest rocket.
Brilliant Labs camps across the Atlantic provinces launched rockets for Rocket Day.
The rockets were made of two-litre pop bottles that teams had decorated. The bottles were half-filled with water and launched using an air pump to build pressure inside the bottle.
Each launch elicited cheers from the campers and their counsellors, as the bottle and a good amount of water went flying into the air over their heads.
“We want kids to be turned on to this idea. It’s not that we want every child here to be a coder or every child here to be a scientist, but we really want them to understand what it’s all about, and if you understand things you can interact better with them,” Barron said about the camp’s goal.
To aid in running the camp, Brilliant Labs hired IT students from CNA and students who had experience with children.
“We feel that if you know how to interact with children, we can teach you how to code,” Barron said.
“I really wanted to do something that wasn’t just a regular day camp for kids,” said counselor Kristen Dyson, who recently graduated from Memorial University with a degree in neuroscience. “I wanted to do something that was learning and interactive, and something that not everybody has a chance to do, because a lot of kids don’t know coding. Giving them a chance to learn it and maybe do engineering when they’re older, females especially, was really something that I was like, ‘Yes, got to do it, got to do it now.’”
At the camp, children have the opportunity to learn some coding and do 3-D printing, in addition to launching bottle rockets.
“When you see a kid not really know if they like it … and you just show them something and you sit there with them for just 10 minutes and get them started and they really take off with it and they realize this is something that they really want to do, they don’t seem interested at first, but you give them the opportunity to get involved and it sparks something you didn’t think would happen,” Dyson said.
Dyson, who has been a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters for the past three years, has arranged with Barron to integrate the coding camp into the Big Brothers Big Sisters program for children who don’t have an opportunity at home to get a chance to learn some coding skills.
