Last Friday, we held our very first Tinusaur workshop in the United States, marking an exciting milestone for our team. The workshop took place in New Jersey and brought together a small group of 10- to 12-year-olds for hands-on STEM activities. We started with soldering, something none of the participants had done before. After learning how to safely use a soldering iron, each child assembled their own Tinusaur Kids.Micro board. Their curiosity was contagious – they asked thoughtful questions, discovered on their own that LEDs have positive and negative terminals, and by the end of the session every board was working perfectly, except for one LED that had been faulty before assembly.
With the hardware ready, we moved on to programming using Blocktinu, our own block-based programming environment. A few of the children had previously experimented with Scratch at school, but they quickly adapted to Blocktinu and were soon writing their very first program: making an LED blink. It was amazing to see how naturally they understood concepts such as loops, delays, and conditional statements. Before long, they were building a pedestrian traffic light, using variables and counters, and making their programs respond to a push button – all within their first few hours of programming.
We finished the workshop by adding sound with the onboard buzzer, which immediately became everyone’s favorite feature. The combination of flashing LEDs and beeping sounds made the projects feel alive, and the room filled with excitement as the children experimented with their creations.
The highlight of the day came at the very end, when one of the participants said she wanted to use her Tinusaur board as part of her school’s STEM Fair project next year. Moments like that remind us why we do what we do, and they made our first Tinusaur workshop in the United States an experience we’ll always remember.