Java Lego Workshop 4 Kids

This past weekend I did a Lego workshop for the local Devoxx4Kids bay area chapter.  There were 35 excited kids from ages 8-14 who had their first taste of programming.  While they expected to simply play with Legos for a few hours, they ended up hacking their first Java code in Eclipse.

The kids did a great job, and all the groups were able to get some basic Java code working on the Lego Mindstorms EV3 platform.  They were using LeJOS, which is a great way to code for and deploy to the Lego intelligent brick using a robust programming language.  Here is a video of one of the completed projects (sorry for my shaky camera work):

Here are some of the photos from the event:

And finally the full slide show with build instructions, which can be downloaded from SlideShare: