CoderDojo Athy

With the Halloween break here, we’ll be off for the next two weekends, back on the 7th of November. See you all then!

We hope everyone has settled into school by now, so we’ll be starting again this year on Saturday 3rd October at the usual time of 10am. See you then!

It’s the end of May, and we’re finished for the summer. For our oldest members finishing this year, best of luck in the Leaving Cert, and for the rest, see you next (academic) year!

Back tomorrow, this is the final stretch before we break for Summer. Hope to see you all there!

We’ll be taking this weekend off for the bank holiday, and will be back the following week (9th May).

It’s the start of the last term before the summer holidays, and we’ll be back tomorrow morning at the usual time. For our older members doing their Leaving Cert this year, best of luck!

Next week is the mid-term break, so there will be no session this Saturday (14th) or the following Saturday. We’ll be back on Saturday 28th. See you then!

Hard drives are the main storage medium inside laptops, PCs and servers (although Solid State Drives (SSDs) are increasingly popular, much faster, and increasingly affordable).

Hard drives consist of a stack of spinning “platters”, with a set of “read heads” on an arm that flies over the surface of the disk to find the data that’s being read or written.

Describing this is all well and good, but really you get a much better feel for this if you actually see it for yourself. So, this morning we took an 8-year-old 500GB drive that died recently and took it apart. DOING THIS KILLS THE DRIVE! Ours was already dead so we had nothing to lose 🙂

For this job we needed a screwdriver with a six-pointer star shaped head, known as a Torx head. Everything inside used the same screwdriver, specifically size T8.

It’s a New Year, the schools are open again, and your tickets up until the mid-term break are now available. See you then!

For our last week we had a little taste of programming in Python, by working with the Minecraft API for the Raspberry Pi.

With a single Pi acting as a server, we had groups surrounding the screen logging in by SSH from their laptops, all starting to use the Minecraft Python API to move, build things and chat. For many it was their first taste of text-based programming. We’ll be looking forward to trying this again in the new year!