It's an exciting time to be a 4th grader. 

Animation, filming, storyboards flying.

Salmon public service announcements will be shared with our newly developed friendship with a school, Yachaikury, deep in the Amazon rainforest of Colombia as a first ever attempt to reach out and share our efforts to save and preserve our local fish while students there share their efforts to save their local fish, the cucha.  

Sharing our ethnobotanical garden and lessons of sustainability with students and community members that live in the largest ethnobotanical garden in the world and practice sustainability everyday has huge potential.

Make no mistake.  Scaling the technology to be current and now for our students and accessible for their community will be a challenge.  Yachaikury has no internet access, no satellite coverage and no cellular.  Hand written letters took 2-3 months, packed in a backpack.  

However, where's the fun if it isn't a challenge!  What better way to bridge what were previously barriers, using technology!  The kids can't wait!

This summer Julie and I had the chance to visit the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, hub for computer science, engineering and robotics. 

Walking into the facility located off campus past a gate, several cameras, a security guard, then needing both an escort and being informed we needed badges at all times, to our left and right were robotic projects GALORE!  

Currently under development, we saw CHIMP, a joint project from NREC, DARPA and Google, created from the unfortunate need of the Fukushima reactor incident and direct descendent from 2 prior robots created by NREC used at 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl.  

What then ensued was 8 hrs straight of coding.  For 5 days.

No breaks.

At one point, someone said, "Isn't it about time for a break?" early on.  There was a brief pause and our instructor who was younger than any of us, thought and said, "No," with the weight and conviction that if we left, we'd fall behind.  

No one left the room.  Then or thereafter.

Without breaking stride, he quickly resumed where he left off. 

At the end, everyone agreed, it was the very best professional development any of us had ever attended in our entire life. 

Julie had wanted to attend CMU's NREC for the last DECADE.  Attendees came from around the world, including Ireland, Madagascar, the Middle East, all across the US and even as close as Seattle Prep.  

In the end, coding can take many forms.  Robotics just happens to be one of them. However for kids, being able to immediately see the result of your efforts, taking the fear of failure out, encourages failure as just another step in the design process.  Re-iterative design, allowing quick prototyping, and tinkering, is essential to creating thoughtful ideas that work. 

Coming up with creative, imaginative solutions where no one way works but several ways ALL work is what we need to tackle the big problems of the 21st century.