Volunteer at the Kids Coding Camp!

Kids Coding Camp is a project to teach Government/Low income private school kids basics of internet, website designing and coding.

Collab House and Camp Diaries are piloting a Coding Camp for Kids over 3 weekends.

GOAL:
50 students of different abilities would be selected for the pilot project in May and June. They should be able to learn the basics of website designing and coding by the end of 3 weekends.  Students will be able to design a basic website by the end of that last day.

GET INVOLVED!

Apply now to become a volunteer:  bit.ly/KidsCodingCamp2017

Deadline to apply: Sunday, 4th June 2017

Next Steps:
Applications Start         – May 7th
Telephonic Interviews – June 3rd onwards for shortlisted volunteers
Teacher Training           –  June 5th and 6th (Time and Venue to be confirmed later)

TIMELINE: Total 6 days of teaching + 2 days of training (Only Saturdays and Sundays)

STUDENTS TRAINING CAMP:
3 Weekends (~ 6 days, 4 hours per day)

WHO CAN APPLY?
We’re looking for ~ 20 passionate volunteers to pilot this project.

If you wish to teach kids computers and coding, this is a great opportunity.

Skills you must possess?

• Basic knowledge of computers
• Aptitude to learn coding
• Willingness to change lives
• Patience and love!
• What else?
- A laptop or the ability to borrow one on the weekends.

VOLUNTEER TRAINING PROGRAM:

• All the selected volunteers will be trained over a weekend for the content and on how to manage and teach kids.
• Each person will have 3 to 4 kids at a time.
• You will be going to the schools and teaching the kids out in the open with hotspot or dongle internet.
• 3 weekends will be devoted to a set of kids and then results will be analyzed.

EXPECTED OUTCOME:

• Increased coding aptitude in all the kids. (With some passionate about it)
• Concentration and patience should be developed in the students through the whole course.
• Impact of the “Culture of Achievement” and “Rigour” strand on the Student Vision Scale used by Teach for India.

WHAT DO YOU GET:

• An opportunity inspire and empower schools kids with no access to technology. Make them dream!
• Opportunity to collaborate with and learn from leaders from Teach For India, Collab House and Camp Diaries.
• Meet inspiring people and create impact this summer.
• Get a Letter of Appreciation and enhance your resume!
• And the satisfaction of teaching the kids 🙂

PARTNERS:

 

Collab House: A Collaborative Community Space

Hyderabad needs a home for people who can collaborate, co-learn and co-work.

We’re building a new self-sustaining local community center– one which can act as a hub of activity for anyone with an independent skill or project and a space for those who seek a chance to build great things alongside the city’s best and brightest.

Collab House is a collaborative community space. We built the space to support hackers, makers, start-ups and creative people to come together, make things, grow their skills, business, in a collaborative, community backed environment.

It will be open to all, where startups, hackers, makers, freelancers, students, artists and those who can work anywhere can gather to collaborate, socialize, teach, learn, play and work.

The Ask:

To date, Collab House has been an all-volunteer effort, powered by members of the community who care. To make all this happen, we have to navigate the crazy expensive world of Jubilee Hills real estate, equipment and furniture.

• The money we’re raising here($8000) will get us closer to the total $30,000 budget we need to keep the space up and running.

• The money raised will be used to repair and paint walls, furnish the space, and fully equip to facilitate community-powered education.
• We’ve started a big beautiful new loft size space at Film Nagar, Hyderabad and are rallying community support to help pay for renovation and outfitting costs.

The Impact:

Help Make This Happen

• Together we’re building an affordable place where people can work happier, be more successful and thrive.
• Members of our collaboration community are bright, hard-working, successful, inspiring people to be around. They’re building software, web sites, and businesses. They’re designing, managing, and building amazing things.
• Most importantly, they’re sharing, ideating and collaborating. At the end of the day, everyone goes home smarter, happier, and more inspired. Hyderabad’s new space will be a home to countless events geared toward helping people learn to be better independents and to connect with others. This includes Meetups, workshops, brainstorms, classes, discussion groups, hackathons, demos, fundraisers, parties, and more.

By offering an extremely affordable and flexible place for people to host their groups and events, we’re fostering the development of healthy communities of people who share common interests. Education is long overdue for an overhaul, and we’re starting to experiment with creative new ways for people to teach and learn. Our focus in the last few weeks has been to initiate activities by doing events, workshops, meetups to promote such collaboration, learning and teaching.

More Ways You Can Help Join the Community!

Membership – Nothing’s better than having great people participate in our community. If you’re interested in membership, head here: http://collab.house/membership

Partnership / Sponsorship – We are open to partner with organizations who share common interests on special programs and projects. Contact Vineel if you’re interested: hello@collab.house or +91 9985 25 8603.

Help spread the word!

• Help us get the word out, share with your friends and network.
• You can always use the Indiegogo share tools!
• Please use #hastag: #LetsCollab

Etchbricks- UNITY

WHEN: 18th & 19th March 2017 | 10:30 am- 4:30 pm
Who Can Come: Anyone interested

Registration Fee: 1200 per head
https://www.facebook.com/CollabHouse/photos/gm.216470652091257/721615798015700/?type=3&theater

ETCH BRICKS:
Etch Bricks is an off-beat start-up by engineers from various disciplines. Unity is the ultimate game development platform. One can use Unity to build high-quality 3D and 2D games, deploy them across mobile, desktop, VR/AR, consoles and across a lot of different applications. Unity plays an important part in a booming global games market. More games are made with Unity than with any other game technology. More players play games made with Unity. So, join us for a 2-day interactive workshop on unity with hands on experience of building of building a Maze solving game . Unity workshop content:
Day – 1:
1. Why Unity and what can we do with it
2. Installing Unity
3. Familiarizing with the Unity Environment
4. Saving and exporting the project
5. Taking inputs from the Keyboard
6. Printing text and numbers to the debug console
7. Creating a Game Object in the 3D world
8. Setting Camera position
9. Moving and rotating the object based on key presses
10. Unity Canvas
11. Rendering
12. Saving Data
13. Physics
Day – 2:
14. Getting started with a Maze Solving game
15. Building, Testing, Exporting and having fun
16. Improvements
17. Improving the UI

 

Apply for The AI Chatbot Gabfest

Do Chatbots fascinate you? Would you like to meet the cool new one? And perhaps try and break it too?

Welcome to the first ever AI Chatbot Gabfest Beta!

We are inviting people to chat, trick and try to break out the cool new AI Chatbot. We are looking for people who are good with conversations, can cover wide rage/gaali-waali topics. 😉

What do you get?
* A great chance to pour your heart out and chat away!
* Be the first to play with the cool new AI Chatbot!
* Fun. Food. Goodies & More!

Apply here: https://goo.gl/forms/kboEB9eqL6hyboV63

Note: Please note this is an Invite only event. After you submit the application form, our team will review and send invitations to selected members.

Connected Devices at Collab House.

Collab House is one of the most prominent maker spaces in the city with the amazing crowd of makers and product developers. We have an engaging crowd from Colleges and Universities with passion for electronics and ideas around Internet of Things. Hence we piloted an Summer Internship for University students to work on Connected devices, the newly announced focus of Mozilla.

The prototype building kicked-off with a 2 week design-sprint which has a fabulous output of ideas and process to jump start. As part of the sprint, the students were divided in to 4 teams, 2 in each team.

Interestingly we had the majority of girl students engaged in the program. The first phase, identification of the challenge and forming the best team to tackle that challenge has created more interest among the students, since this is the first time that they are looking at the grass root level of the challenge and think of a solution in a bottom to top approach. The problem statement is sketched in the form of a map, a flowchart of the problem statement, causes of the challenge and the ways to solve it.

We had a line of industry leaders who educated the group about developing a prototype. With the makers in house and also professionals from our connections were invited to project a bigger picture of product development and also about their industry experience to our Interns team. There was a talk on Design Thinking by Vineel, a line of sessions on 3D printing by Sandeep and also on product architecture by Priyanka.

The interns are also encouraged to be part of the regular events of Hackster.io and iRaspberryPi at Collab House. Vivek Manoharan, research scholar from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore spoke about his work in Biomechanics & Ergonomics, Design Thinking and more with our interns to help them get started with their work.

After the sprint, talks, workshops, there was a bit of hacking on Arduino and RaspberryPi to have an idea on functionality, feasibility to check whether the idea is implementable using a particular platform.

1 month of the program and we have a solid ideas on paper and the students committed themselves to work on the prototypes for the next couple of months.

The enthusiasm for the students is was amazing. This initiative has created a spark among the Mozillians of Mozilla Hyderabad, encouraging the to take part of this program and make stuff while hacking the existing ones.

Interactive art | A Blend Aesthetics of and electronics

 

Collaborations are going to help mankind in making better, interesting and sustainable future for the generations to come. To catch up with the pace with which the world is advancing, there is an essential need of collaborations between individuals, ideas, companies and nations. Collab House as it’s name indicates, is a place for collaborations and a hub for connected communities. We are one of the most active makerspaces in the country while making amazing stuff in collaboration with other communities.

On 15th of June 2016, as Collab House celebrated it’s second anniversary, our team planned to set up an interactive art installation which binds and blends Art, Architecture, Electronics and Technology together. To celebrate the 2 years of Making,  our team, Vineel, Harsha and Akshay along with Himanshu (Banana House ~Makerspace in Delhi), Prasan Dutt (Mooshic Labs, Electronics product developers) has setup the installation on interactive art and electronics, surprising the people present for the party.

 

“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist” –R. Buckminster Fuller

With the objective of pushing ourselves together to do more with the existing resources, we have committed to make an attractive and simple design which motivates makers and entertains others.

The concept of the model is to make interesting sounds when there is a human interaction with the boxes, the interaction happening through water closes an electronics circuit while creating a unique sound with each box. The boxes are filled with water and simple touch on the surface of water closes the circuit making interesting sounds. The water acts as a slab of capacitance with the 2 capacitor plates being the bottom of the box and the person’s hand/palm/fingers.

The curiosity about design and technology has created an excitement for our communities to make things out of simple electronics yet sophisticated architecture and aesthetics. We are an ideologically elevated team challenged with the motto of building incredible things while focusing at the paining problems of the society. The concurrency in the alignment of our goals is the factor behind our amazing team to get things done, with out an excuse.

Aesthetics, an open standard to be taken care of.

 

Himashu at work, late in the night.

 

The term ‘perfection’ is demoralising, hence we strive for ‘excellence’, since it is a motivating factor for every one of our community. There is no boundary for us when we try to excel, since we set new standards while making things. Perfection puts a cap on our standards, restricting us from breaking things and accepting failures.

Prasan Dutt fabricating the LED circuitry.

The soldering and stuff

Some serious, circuit integration stuff.

 

We have considered many ways to make this happen, while only the final one happened, the obstacles, the circuit breakdown, the soldering not going through, the arduino break down, and the nearing of deadline, nothing could stop us form making this amazingly cool installation marking its elegance at the party. The curious crowd, asking us on how we did this, we could say, it is a team work. Presented by a team of connected communities.

Freecode Camp 3rd Meetup.

FreeCodeCamp Hyderabad, a local developer community started not even a month ago, just had their 4th meet-up in the city at everyone’s favorite maker space, Collab House. The community is mentored by three passionate developers  – Kapil, Ramana and Arijit.

For this meetup, Ramana, who works as a web developer, taught the members of the community the fundamentals of web layout. The session covered concepts like how the browser treats the structure of any webpage, and how by understanding its inner workings we can break down complex layouts into a simple binary question of – “Is it aligned vertically or horizontally?”

This discussion was not about teaching the syntax of HTML/CSS or JavaScript. It was to convey the abstract ideas built into the fabric of the web. To be a web developer, one needs to take these baby steps. A web developer, at the very least, needs to understand how their code interacts with the browser.

The session started off with a simple idea conceptualised thousands of years ago, called Divide and Conquer. This idea is so primitive yet powerful, that we can lay the foundation with it. We may think of it as a basic strategy for solving any real/virtual world problem.
The crux of the idea is simple, to be able to solve a complex problem, you need to divide it into subproblems. Divide it to the point of absolute simplicity, where you can understand the process from the fundamental level and then conquer it.

To apply this simple concept to writing good code, one needs to ask a few questions -:

• What are the inputs to my program?
• What outputs are we expecting?   
• What logic goes in between to take the given input and convert it to the expected output?

From here, we move to understanding the fundamentals of CSS layouts.

You might be wondering now that how  CSS can have inputs and outputs?

And that is a good question. Well, no need to worry! Input and Output in this context refers to our target design. The UI Mockup or Wireframe you have been provided in a Photoshop PSD file. Or a random site whose layout you are trying to copy (nothing to be ashamed of! Mimicry is the highest display of respect).

Ramana pointed out to some sample sites such as OMGUbuntu, Wikipedia and even the FCC random quote generator project. Our output was going to be the UI base layout of these sites. Basically, creating the containers which hosts the data and images displayed on these sites. We started by asking the same basic question, is our input (sample site) aligned vertically or horizontally? We restricted ourselves to two placement algorithms – display block and display flex.

By default, display block aligns elements vertically (one on top of another) and display flex horizontally (right next to each other). By using these two algorithms, we start constructing our target layout from scratch. Ramana demonstrated the usage of uncommon background colors to get quick feedback on your design. If some placement of component within the layout was not as expected, the feedback was clear about where we went wrong. The background color highlights the component. After a two hour refresher on this layout, we moved on to using simple jQuery to display data in a table format. Here’s the best part – we didn’t use any table component! We carry forwarded our learning from layouts – that one can implement any layout reliably using only the first principles.

It was a simple table layout to display some info about a group of people. Any data table would have the desirable property to be able to sort in order when one clicks on a table column header. When you view your email in Outlook or Thunderbird, you probably sort your mails by subject or sender or date. We implemented that with jQuery. The rendering logic and sorting logic to achieve this again followed the first principle – divide the main problem to a set of simpler subproblems that can be individually solved, and composed together to get a complete, end-to-end solution.

The session ended with a deeper dive into all things flexbox. CSS tricks has a nice article on all things flexbox can do to align your content in different directions, add proper space within the components, stretch or shrink them etc.

“Informative and comprehensible approach towards layout in large. Ramana made sure that we learn new ways(read: flex) to structure elements on the page. Overall I feel these sessions should continue along with pair programming to increase the participant’s competency in the language.” – Rahul Nayak | FCC Hyd Member