We had our second meeting for our summer activiies at the Purcellville Library on Thursday, June 30th. A smaller meeting this time, with about 8 students, but still had tons of things to talk about. While the meetings are free-form, we seem to be focusing on several areas:

• At least two students are focusing on building the same Z-80 computer kit we built last year.
• At least two students are learning Python via the access to Lynda.com available through the Loudoun Library (and that is worth a blog post here)
• One student is using an arduino starter kit to build interesting devices, and will present some stuff at a future meeting
• One student is working with CSV files, Mysql, and Ruby to do some ‘interesting’ slicing and dicing of data.
• Chess seems to be a recurrent theme at our meetings. We showed some chess-playing programs and will be diving into the source code over the coming weeks.
• At least two students were soldering some basic projects last night as well. (Computer Science and the maker movement are closely related).
• One of the students who built the computer last year is considering building an led display and writing Conway’s Game of Life to run on the comouter.

Our next meeting will include more of the above, and whatever topics you bring. While this meeting is intended for high school students with some programming knowledge, adults are welcome to attend to! Well be announcing some programs for elementary and middle-school students soon as well.

The rest of our summer shedule is as follows:

• Wednesday, July 6th from 5:00 - 9:00pm at Purcellville Library
• Wednesday, July 13th from 6:00 - 9:00pm pm at Rust Library in Leesburg*
• Thursday July 21st from 6:00 - 9:00pm at Rust Library in Leesburg*
• Tuesday, July 26th from 5:00 - 9:00pm at Purcellville Library
• Wednesday, August 3rd from 5:00 - 09:00pm at Purcellville Library
• Tuesday, August 9th from 5:00 - 9:00pm at Purcellville Library
• Thursday, August 18th from 5:00 - 9:00pm at Purcellville Library
• Wednesday, August 24th from 5:00 - 9:00pm at Purcellville Library

Note: Two events above are at the Rust library in Leesburg. Stay tuned, as we are planning a special event!

If you’re interested in hanging out and learning something, even in bringing your own agenda item, please show up! This isn’t a classroom structure, this is more like a bazaar of tech-related hangout.

I hope to see you there!