The summer before his seventh-grade year, Rhett Bothwell’s mom signed him up for Lincoln Public Schools’ summer technology program.
She told him she was going to do it, then she did it, with little input from her son, who wasn’t all that thrilled with the idea.
But the truth, said the now-much-wiser son who will start his sophomore year at Lincoln East High School this fall, is his summer days were mostly idle before that and in hindsight, that was one smart mom move.
So he kept enrolling, honing his stop-motion movie skills, trying his hand at drones, creating video games and telling his friends what he was up to when he'd disappear for half a day.
And because what he was up to sounded so much more interesting than “nothing,†they started to ask him about his movies and games and drone adventures.
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“I did have fun,†Bothwell said. “When I was told I couldn’t go into class after ninth grade, I was kind of devastated. I wanted to keep doing this as long as I could.â€
That’s why Bothwell is teacher Kent Steen’s classroom assistant this summer, helping students whose moms signed them up for the summer technology program, with or without their input.
The district’s summer technology program has been around more than 20 years, though it’s changed significantly since the days when it focused mostly on creating digital media.
Today, there are 24 weeklong classes that run over three sessions and cover everything from coding to robotics to drones to web design.
They’re open to kids who will be entering fourth through ninth grades in the fall and this summer’s enrollment has topped 380 students — 100 more than last year.
Steen, who became the district’s computer science curriculum specialist in 2013 when the school board gave the go-ahead for K-12 computer science curriculum, taught the class last week that allowed kids to dabble in drones and stop-motion animation and video game design.
Connor Heinzle and Isaac Kohlenberg — from Scott and Schoo middle schools — took their inspiration from some cool YouTube videos of unpeeling oranges and water flowing out of a glass, and created videos of Legos disconnecting and torn paper putting itself back together.
Across the room, Mirabella Kundhi and Willie Schaffner, who will both start seventh grade at Scott, created a cat and flowers out of origami and made themselves a stop-motion video, the inspiration for which escaped both of them.
“I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m just going with it,†Schaffner said.
Across the hall, the Hawthorne Elementary School media center had become a battleground for student-made robots, and students in the room learned the basics of robotics on smaller Lego creations and computer programs that made them spin and whir.
The point of all this technological imagination? Fun.
“The goal is they have so much fun in these classes it will motivate them to want to take more as they get older,†Steen said.
“These kids are the next generation of our creators and inventors. Not everyone will go into computer science, but having at least some of the background in it is going to be beneficial.â€
Seeing kids — like Bothwell — who sign up for classes more than once is particularly gratifying, Steen said, and the work is open-ended and creative enough that they can build on what they’ve already learned.
Brent Jarosz, the program coordinator, said one of the best parts of the summer program is how engaged kids are in what they’re doing.Â
“It’s been fun to see how excited they are to come every day and try something new."
Bothwell definitely recommends it.Â
"It's just a good experience."