Gifted Atlanta

East Point Tech offers a computer programming program for teens ages 13 to 16, starting next month.

Saturday Coding School is a four-week course which teaches HTML, CSS and front- and back-end web development. No previous coding experience is needed. The teens also get an introduction to a bit of entrepreneurial training, with a look at how to market their own design business.

Classes are limited to ten students each.

The Intro to Web Development course begins July 12.

Tellus Museum in Cartersville has two upcoming events for kids:

The annual RockFest rock and mineral show will come to Tellus June 14-15, 2014. Visitors will see a range of minerals, gems and fossils. If your child has a special rock find they haven’t been able to identify, take it along and let experts have a look. The museum will also offer activities for the kids. Admission to RockFest is part of the general ticket price.

Then, on June 25, the museum brings back past guest Joe Turner for his lunchtime “Magic of Science” show. If you want to pre-order lunch (and have a reserved seat), call (770) 606-5700, ext. 431 by June 18.

I’m letting my eight-year-old daughter, who just joined Bookopolis, write today’s post. She says:

Bookopolis is a good program for children who like to read. It lets them give and get recommendations for good books. You can earn badges for letting everyone else know what books you liked.

I’ll add a bit myself. . . . Bookopolis is a free web site aimed at elementary and early middle-school readers. Kids can write reviews of books they’ve read. They receive suggestions for other books they might like, and can read other kids’ reviews of books recommended for them. They can also actively share book recommendations with friends they’ve connected with through the site. This is a great way to encourage and track summer reading.

I can’t write any more now, because my daughter just said, “Let’s go to Bookopolis now.”

You can learn the science behind some of Georgia’s most popular natural destinations by attending guided geology walks and talks this month with a noted science educator from the Fernbank Science Center.

Dr. Bill Witherspoon is co-author of the book Roadside Geology in Georgia (Mountain Press Publishing, 2013). He is an award-winning earth science teacher who has worked with K-12 students for more than 15 years.

Dr. Witherspoon’s public program schedule is as follows:

• June 6, 2014, 11:00 a.m., Amicalola Falls, walk to the falls
• June 7, 2014, 1:00 p.m., Amicalola Falls, “River Rivalries,” a presentation on how competing streams sculpted geological features including Tallulah Gorge and Amicalola Falls
• June 7, 2014, 3:30 p.m., Dahlonega Gold Museum, “Gold and Georgia,” a presentation about how gold accumulated in the Georgia mountains, leading to the Georgia gold rush
• June 14, 2014, 9:30 a.m., Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park, walk along Pine Mountain. Co-presenter at this site will be Dr. Leslie Edwards, a biogeographer from Georgia State University who will look at the unusual combination of plant life at Pine Mountain.
• June 28, 2014, 1:00 p.m., Brasstown Bald, “A Window through Time: Geology and Nature at Georgia’s Highest Summit,” co-presented with Dr. Edwards, who will discuss why some plants typically not found this far south still grow atop this mountain.
• June 29, 2014, 1:00 p.m., Anna Ruby Falls, geology walk

These events are free and open to the public, but you may have to pay admission to the venues where they are being held. Register ahead of time and you’ll receive a billion-year-old rock sample.

Readers,

I have to apologize for the error in my recent post about the lunar eclipse. It is not tonight / tomorrow morning, but rather took place early this morning, a few hours ago.

My understanding is that because the skies were overcast last night, there was no available viewing in our night sky here in Atlanta, so in the end, visitors to Tellus were not able to see the eclipse through the telescopes, only through videos shot elsewhere. Still, it’s always my aim to be accurate, so I felt obliged to publish this correction.

Thanks for your understanding.

– Dori

It’ll take pulling an all-nighter, but if you want to witness a total lunar eclipse, head to Tellus Museum in Cartersville in the wee hours of Monday night / Tuesday morning.

Tellus will open its doors at 1 a.m. and remain open until 5:30 a.m., with all telescopes pointed at the moon. The eclipse will begin shortly before 2 a.m., and will be in totality at 3:06 a.m.

Regular admission for non-members; free for museum members.

This spring, Georgia State University has partnered with the Forsyth County School System to offer Saturday School at Lambert High School in Suwanee. Classes begin this Saturday, April 5 and the registration deadline is April 3. (Sorry I’m getting this to all of you so late — I’m just finding out about it myself.)

This satellite campus means that people living in Cumming, Woodstock, or Buford — who may not have wanted to make the trek to Georgia State’s downtown campus on Saturday mornings — now have easier access to Saturday School, which has built a great reputation over its nearly 40-year history for offering enrichment classes to kids who would like to learn more about topics of special interest alongside other gifted kids.

As always, admission to Saturday School requires that a child be gifted identified by his or her school; however, a new Saturday School student can be granted provisional admission until paperwork is submitted.

The Lambert High School campus Saturday School will be open to students in grades 4 through 8.

Science lovers, rejoice.

The Atlanta Science Festival kicks off this Saturday, offering a solid week of science-related activities on more topics than I’m going to list here. They’ve got robotics, biology, environmental science, astronomy, and more, at locations in and around Atlanta.

It all culminates in the Exploration Expo, a huge, free event on Saturday, March 29, at Centennial Olympic Park. Dozens of companies and schools will host hands-on activities geared toward kids and families.

The festival is a joint effort among Emory University, Georgia Tech, and the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. If all goes well, they’re hoping to make it an annual springtime ritual.

The Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (IMACS) offers new students a 25 percent discount on its online series of math courses for highly talented students — but only through this Friday, Jan. 31, 2014.

The discount applies when you purchase the five-course set: Operational Systems; The Integers; Sets, Subsets & Set Operations; Ordered n-Tuples; and the newly released Mappings course, which looks at relationships between the elements of sets.

IMACS is intended for middle-school students whose high intellect enables them to learn foundational concepts of math, which are then applied to topics in the standard high-school math curriculum. Completing the Elements of Mathematics: Foundations coursework in middle-school will enable these kids to take IMACS’ college-level math courses during high school.