To celebrate the National Youth Science Day (NYSD) challenge in October, the 4-H Youth Development Program in Santa Clara County offered two peer teaching NYSD events, where teens taught younger youth physical activities and puzzles from Game Changers, a computational thinking curriculum created by Google and the West Virginia Extension Service. In education, computational thinking refers to problem solving processes involved in expressing solutions as a sequence of steps that can be carried out by a computer.

4-H Teen Teacher helping students complete the Hack Your Harvest activity.

October 4th: NYSD at Escuela Popular

The first event was held on October 4th at Escuela Popular Dual Language Learning Academy in San Jose, California, thanks to a grant from National 4-H Council in partnership with Lockheed Martin.

In preparation for their event, 4^th graders learned from Spanish-speaking teens, Hack Your Harvest, a puzzle where children learned the concepts of optimal efficiency to figure out the fastest way to take a tractor to the barn. The first few puzzles are relatively easy; they grow in complexity as obstacles are added, and children need to pick up lettuce as well. For the NYSD event, the 4^th graders created their own puzzles to teach 5^th graders. Concurrently, 5^th graders learned Program Your Playground, a physical activity where children learn the use of conditional statements while developing multiple games of “tag” that also grew in complexity. The 5^th graders created their own games to teach to the 4^th graders.

On the day of the event, 71 fourth and fifth grade students engaged in peer teaching. They learned the intersection of technology with agriculture, and how computer science and computational thinking play an important role in linking the two. These students were mentored by 13 Teen Teachers.

While all activities were taught in Spanish, during implementation the Teen Teachers coached youth in two languages.

Students working intently to solve the Hack Your Harvest puzzle.

Through observation, participating students increased their science literacy and gained valuable skills in leadership, communication, and positive peer interaction. In the near future, Teen Teachers, or Maestros Jovenes will continue to expand youth's computational thinking concepts to cultivate their problem solving skills, and interest and skills in computer science.

We hope we can inspire youth to reach beyond what they thought they were capable of, and get to witness the amazing things they achieve when they do.

Students engaged in physical activity while teaching youth their unique versions of tag, created in the Program Your Playground activity.

Smiles all around while learning computational thinking with Hack Your Harvest.

Teen Teachers presenting to 71 4th and 5th grade students.

Students working together to teach and solve their Hack Your Harvest puzzles.

October 20th: NYSD at Google Complex

The second event was held on October 20^th at the Google Complex in Sunnyvale, thanks to a grant from National 4-H in partnership with Google. To prepare for this event, four teens met weekly to plan the event. Each teen was in charge of teaching one of the NYSD activities. This event was open to the public. More than 50% of the participants were not already enrolled in 4-H.

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If you've held an NYSD event in your club or county, add it to our map! Send your story and photos to Suzanne Morikawa so we can share it on the California 4-H Grown blog.