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Impact Report

For plan Youth Development (Los Alamos County)
Date November 2, 2011, 6:33 pm
For Objective Medium-term Show medium-term objectives
Impact Report The agent dedicated time to maintaining and supporting traditional 4-H club leaders and members. 4-H members and leaders had an opportunity to participate in a variety of county-wide 4-H activities during the year. Advertisement for activities was done via e-mail reminders to leaders. These activities included: Camps, Workshops, Clinics & Trainings: The agent provided programing to 112 youth in collaboration with Mesa Public Libraries Youth Services at the annual Chile Camp in June and July. The camp is devoted to making reading fun through the addition of arts and crafts activities to stories which are read each week for eight weeks. This year’s camp concentrated on international stories involving farming including Greek, Asian, African and Native American mythology. Competitive Events: Los Alamos County Fair. Sixteen 4-H members exhibited 16 indoor exhibits. New Mexico State Fair -- Five 4-H members exhibited five exhibits. Four or 80% of the five exhibits received first, place awards. Awards & Recognition: Four 4-H members submitted end of year record books. An Annual 4-H Awards Program for the 2009-2010 year was held January 8th at White Rock Town Hall. The purpose of the program was to recognize 4-H members who completed 4-H record books, and to recognize 4-H members and leaders for the number of years they’ve been involved in the program. Outstanding 4-H youth and volunteers were also recognized. Twelve 4-H’ers and seven 4-H leaders received awards. Bruch, provided by the 4-H families in attendance, was a new offering at this Saturday morning program. Twenty members, leaders and parents were in attendance. Community Service: The 4-H Council created “4-H Scarecrow” for the Los Alamos Scarecrow contest. The scarecrow contest is sponsored by the Los Alamos Arts Council and is open to any community organization. The Council was awarded the Sleepy Hollow Award consisting of a certificate and cash award. Family Festival – Decorating 4-H Cookies – Nine 4-H youth and ten adult volunteers provided leadership to this annual event geared towards young families. One hundred forty (140) youngsters participated in the “Decorating 4-H Cookies” activity. Children decorated four leaf clover cookies, made by 4-H members, with a variety of decorating toppings. The Family Festival is sponsored by Family Strengths Network School Enrichment In collaboration with the Los Alamos Middle School 7th grade science teacher the agent made four presentations to 92 students on Basic Botany and four presentations on Native Plants. A number of computer games and collecting and mounting plants found on school grounds were strategies used to communicate the topic. The agent provided programming to 16 youth on seed germination at McCurdy Elementary School in Espanola. Special Interest The new 4-H Robotics Program serves as an early introduction to robotics for elementary age students. Through a series of cross-curricular building and programming activities, the system integrates science, math, and literacy concepts while teaching the basics of control technology. The agent facilitated the group of 9-14 year olds using Lego MindstormsNXT. There were 12 participants in the program who met weekly. The kits included small motors, simple sensors, wheels, gearwheels, belts, and relays - everything the members needed to construct a series of different robots. The kits were developed in accordance with educational principles derived from Jean Piaget's theories of cognitive development (1966) as revised by Seymour Papert (1980;1986). This approach suggests that the center of all learning processes is the active role of the learner who enlarges his/her knowledge through the manipulation and construction of objects. Giving life to an object through interaction with a personal computer makes it possible to develop applications which go beyond the original ideas of those who first proposed this methodology. Members constructed small, mobile machines that simulated the behaviors of real animals. Such prototypes are essentially mobile robots. Like real animals they have a sensory apparatus (i.e. sensors which are sensible to light or heat), a motor system (e.g. mechanical arms or wheels controlled by motors) and a brain (represented by a computer programmed to control the motor system using information from the sensory apparatus). Practical experiments such as these helped learners to assimilate concepts which would otherwise be abstract and obscure. The children assimilated the notions of dynamics and complexity through the construction of systems composed of a number of hardware and software components. They learned to study reality from different points of view (i.e. at different levels of analysis) by observing the behavior of individual robots.