Junior Think Like a Programmer Rewrite

This time last year I was up to my eyeballs in national governance and great excitement about the October 2017 G.I.R.L. National Convention!  I have no idea how I juggled service unit and troop responsibilities for the new troop year on top of becoming a national delegate late in the game, how I prepped for the National Convention, and how I kept up with the blog discussion about membership dues.  This year I’ve only (I say ONLY – ha ha!) had just troop and service unit responsibilities, and I’ve still been completely swamped along with my life outside of Girl Scouts going nuts.  I’m squeezing this blog post in while I have a few moments to myself.  Calgon, take me away!

But back to the World According to Girl Scouts.  Summer before last, GSUSA released a set of three STEM Journeys for the Daisy, Brownie, and Junior levels called Think Like an Engineer, Think Like a Citizen Scientist, and Think Like a Programmer.  The activities for these Journeys can only be found in the Volunteer Toolkit (aka VTK).  The Cadette, Senior, and Ambassador levels each received their own set of three STEM Journeys this past summer. 

Last month I uploaded a rewrite/reformat of the Junior Think Like a Citizen Scientist Journey.  I reformatted it because I plan on doing this Journey with our Junior level sometime later this year, and I became very frustrated trying to flip through pages upon pages upon pages of material while I was reviewing it to see if it was something we could do.  Although I am a computer nerd, I still like to have good old fashioned paper in front of me so that I can scribble quick notes and whatever else I need to run the meeting.  It’s faster for me to reference a piece of paper during the craziness of a meeting rather than my laptop.  I have a tablet, but it’s ultra slow.

I posted this reformatted edition to our council’s UNOFFICIAL Facebook group, and it was well received.  The blog post has also gotten a lot of hits via Facebook and Pinterest, so there’s interest out there for something like this.  Someone asked if I’d do the same for the Junior Think Like a Programmer Journey.  So before things got too hectic in my life, I was able to git ‘er done:

Junior Think Like a Programmer Journey Rewrite

I put this together very quickly, so if you see something that needs to be corrected, please let me know.  Like the last reformat, I consolidated the Meeting Notes, Activity Plans, Materials List, and Meeting Aids.  This Journey has been pared down from 159 pages to 49.

I would go into a more detailed analysis of this Journey, but number one, I don’t have the time to put toward it right now, and second, I usually don’t like to comment about a Journey or badge until I actually do it with my troop.  But by coincidence, this YouTube video came across my Facebook timeline via Sylvia Acevedo’s page while I was writing this blog post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0atqH8pmMzg

So at this point, only the Junior Think Like an Engineer is left in the series.  I hadn’t planned on reformatting it, but after thinking about it, poor Think Like an Engineer might feel slighted.  Plus I’ve got some OCD in me, and leaving that one out will bug me until the trilogy is completed.  I’m not sure when I’ll get to it, but I will at some point!

Back to the grind!

Addendum 2/19/19:  Here’s the Junior Think Like an Engineer Journey rewrite!