CoderDojo Athy

Tickets for week two (Saturday 1st February) are now available. Remember the morning session is looking at AppInventor, while the afternoons are about Scratch.

CoderDojo Athy is back, starting Saturday 25th.

Starting this term we are adding an afternoon session for those who aren’t able to attend in the morning. With two sessions we are also going to try working on different things in each session. We can always use more mentors; if you’re able to help we’d appreciate it.

If you’re interested in computers, and have something other than Scratch or AppInventor you want to work on, you’re more than welcome to come along to any session. We certainly have space if you and some friends want to work together as a group on something, and we’ll try to help in any way we can.

Morning session (10:00-12:00)

In the mornings we’re going to work on AppInventor. This is a system for designing apps for Android smartphones and Android tables (not iPhones or iPads, sorry!). It’s more complicated than Scratch, so we’d suggest you should already be comfortable with Scratch (or, if you’ve never attended CoderDojo before, any other experience programming would be good).

If at all possible, you should bring an Android smartphone or tablet with you. You’ll need to install the App Inventor Companion app on it, which only takes a minute. If you can’t get your hands on a real Android device, you can use the software emulator. This simulates a complete smartphone running Android in a window on the PC. It does the job, but it is sluggish and nowhere near as much fun as the real thing.

Afternoon session (14:15-16:00)

This session is for beginners who would like to learn Scratch. It is aimed at kids who are 8-14 years old. Scratch is a good way to expose kids to the basics of software programming. Parents must attend for kids under 12 years. Parents are also encouraged to get involved with the kids and continue the education at home. A laptop is preferrable to which the Kids have access. We can provide the software. Kids whom have just a basic knowledge of Scratch are also welcome and wish to continue to learn more.

We’re all finished for the year, and looking forward to the Christmas break. We hope you’ve had fun this term with Scratch. In the new year we’ll be continuing on with Scratch, but we’re also hoping to try writing some mobile phone apps with App Inventor, and maybe some 3D graphics if we can get a few interested students together.

If there’s anything else you want to try, let us know and we’ll see what we can do. If you and a few friends just want somewhere to work together on some computer projects of your own, that’s perfect, we have plenty of space.

We’ll announce the starting date soon. Until then, have a happy Christmas and a great new year!

Two things! First, below are some notes on the space invaders game we did this week in the advanced class. Secondly, with Christmas coming there’s a shortage of mentors and many of you are busy too. So next week there’ll only be a beginners class, and it’s the last class this term. If you’re from the advanced class you are still, of course, more than welcome to come along and work on your own thing, ask questions, etc.

This week in the advanced class we worked through a basic space invaders game, shooting aliens walking across the screen. I’ve uploaded it exactly as it was shown if you want to refer to it again.

I found that over time during the game, the sprites drifted out of sync with each other. To keep them in lock-step with each other, you need to control the timing of their movement in a single place. The way I came up with was to put a script as part of the Stage that used broadcasts and some shared variables to communicate with the alien sprites. You can see that version here.

This week we looked at using Scratch’s “Mesh” network system to get our computers talking to each other. We’ve put some notes up on the Resources page about it, in particular to pay attention to messages from the Windows firewall when you’re getting started.

If you’re like most people, you probably only have one computer you can use at a time at home. If you want to work on something with Mesh a simple trick is to open Scratch twice. One can be the Host, and the other can Join it; it’ll work the same as if you had each copy running on different computers.

Next week we’ll do a little more with Mesh. At this stage, though, we’ve shown you pretty much every part of Scratch. It’s time to start thinking of what you want to build. Imagine a game or anything you like and think about what it needs to do. Talking to friends about it (even if they’ve never been to CoderDojo) is a great way to work things out in your head. If you’re completely stuck, you can at least start drawing any sprites you’ll need, and when we’re back next week we’ll figure out what to do.

See you then!

It was great to see another good turnout; we hope you’re all enjoying it! This week we had a room to get all the new kids started with Scratch, and one for those who were here before. This week we worked on a simple two-player football game to see how sprites (the players and the ball) could interact with each other and with the goals drawn on the background, as well as keep track of scores.

You can download the version we made and see how it works. I’ve added a little bit of code to the football so it moves a bit more nicely (can you figure out how it works?). Maybe you can add some more “costumes” to the ball so it looks like its rolling, or perhaps keep track of the score so the game ends when somebody scores 5 goals? See what you can come up with, and we hope to see as many of you as possible next week!

Download Scratch_Football.zip, or see it on the scratch.mit.edu website.

The coming weeks will advance your knowledge of Scratch. Design a football game! Make your own pac man. Integrate the players with a Pico Board to control the game for a handheld slider. Learn how to run scratch alongside Lego and Arduino Boards. Already Excited!!!
Come and take part…

Wow, what a great session yesterday with over 35 kids. Great creative buzz shown by all. Next week we will have 2 full rooms, one staying with the basics and the other pushing on to more advanced scratch projects. Tickets (free, as always!) are available through Eventbrite again:

UPDATE: All tickets have been snapped up already, but you can put your name on the waitlist on Eventbrite in case anyone cancels or we are able to make more space available.

Tickets for the first CoderDojo Athy session are now available, free, through Eventbrite.

CoderDojo Athy is getting ready!

We will be running on Saturdays from 10am to 12pm, starting October 12th, in Athy College on the Monasterevin Road. Tickets will be available, free, through Eventbrite shortly.

CoderDojos are entirely run by volunteers. The more volunteers we have, the more spaces we can make available. If you can help in any way, just let us know.