Scratch Beginners Week 4 – A Better Ghost Catcher Game

Posted on October 20, 2015 by cdathenry

This week we improved on Martha’s original Ghost Catcher game! The notes can be found on this website as CDA-S5-Challenge_04-BetterGhostCatcher.

We animated our ghosts by creating a simple change costume script that runs forever, Season 5 Better ghostcatcher- animate ghost - costume

We made our ghosts broadcast a message when they are caught to make ghostcatcher (aka Bob) change his costume (Hint!: First, we made a new costume for Ghostcatcher Bob to make his mouth look closed!),

We also got Ghostcatcher Bob to broadcast a message that makes the stage change it’s background to each time a level is changed.

If you have any questions about all the variables, ghostscaught and speed, that you saw in my version of the program, please review the notes on this website for the previous week: CDA-S5-Week_03-Ghostcatcher.pdf. Check out the last few slides.

Thanks to Martha Fahy for all her notes so that we could really make huge progress with our Ghost Catcher game!

Have a very Happy Halloween and we will see ye all back on Saturday November 7th at 12.00!

Julie OBeirn

Week 4 – Unity Taster Session

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Kieran Coughlan

Thanks everyone for a fun session today. Although we were some way from the finished product, I hope that it gave everyone a taste for what you can achieve in Unity.

No doubt there are a few of you ninjas who’d like to complete the game under your own steam, For you, the complete notes on how to finish this game off can now be downloaded from here.

Best of luck if you do choose to finish it off and we’ll probably return to this material after the break and discuss in more detail some of the things we glossed over today for the sake keeping things simple for the taster session.

Scratch Advanced: Week 3 Top Down Game Engine Part 1

Posted on October 15, 2015 by cdathenry

A “Game Engine” is a piece of code you can use to build different types of games. This week we looked at doing a top down scrolling game engine. It’s still pretty basic at the moment but it’s enough to get started on some projects of your own. What can you build with it?

Top Down Scrolling Game Part 1 Notes

Download the code for part 1 here.

Week 3 – Scratch Beginners – Ghostcatcher

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Martha Fahy

Hello Everyone

Great to see so many of you there on Saturday, 85 Ninjas!. Hope you had a good time. And a special welcome to our new Ninjas.

This week we created a Ghostcatcher game. We used the paint editor in Scratch for the first time. As I said on Saturday, It makes things easier if you think in shapes.

Using the code we have learned so far, we moved the Ghostcatcher with the mouse and the Ghosts randomly. We also added sounded and score.

For those of you who would like to add more complexity, I have a couple of ideas at the end of the notes. Give it a go and if you need any help, just ask one of the mentors at the beginning of the next session.

From next week the Scratch Beginners Group will be given by Julie. I won’t be too far away, so you will see me around! We have a new session this year called Unity. It is a games platform and we expect a large number of the kids will take it so I am going to help out in that room with Kieran.

A big THANK YOU to Julie for taking over for me.

Here are this weeks notes in PDF. CDA-S5-Week_03-Ghostcatcher.pdf

PiDojo : A taste of the Raspberry Pi

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Declan Fox

Today we had our second taster session with the Raspberry Pi. We wrote a basic a basic hello world program using Nano which is a simple command line text editor. Then we coded the physical computing version of hello world which is turning a led on and off.

When the Raspberry Pi And Electronics group starts up properly we will revisit this and look at the code in more depth. I will also show you how to set up your own RPi if you have one, remember a Raspberry Pi is not necessary, I will also show you how to connect to a virtual desktop.

Here are my slides from today Taster Session

Taster Session Week 4 – Unity 3D

Posted on October 10, 2015 by Kieran Coughlan

For our fourth taster session, on next Saturday 17th October, we’ll be giving an introduction to Unity. Unity is a cross-platform game engine which has been used to create many successful games.

In preparation for next week please:

Go to the unity website: www.unity3D.com
Click the “Get Unity 5” button
Download and install the free “Personal Edition”
Run Unity once and register an account – you will need your email address

We will be trying to build as much as possible of the “Roll-a-ball” demo that I showed in our introductory session. Ongoing participation in the Unity group will require a good understanding of advanced programming concepts, but for the taster session, we will try to keep that stuff to a minimum so everyone can follow along and have fun.

Week 2 – Scratch Beginners – Building on our first game

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Martha Fahy

Hi everyone,

Great to see so many of you there on Saturday. This weeks starting point was our game from last week. We wanted to add extra functionality. We added code to the Heart so that something happened when the Hippo touched it. Most people added some sound.

We also made our first variable. We did this so that we could keep track of our score. Using this score we also could add code to make something happen when you reached a certain score and win the game. Again here we added a sound and switched backgrounds.

We learned and used a lot of new code this week and we will see over the coming weeks how we can incorporate it into many different types of games.

Why don’t you try using all the code we have used so far to create your own game. We will take time at the beginning of next weeks session to look at any games that people want to show us.

See you all next week!

Here are the notes from todays session in PDF CDA-S5-Week_02-FirstGame-Part2.pdf

Scratch Advanced: Twister Part 2

Posted on October 3, 2015 by cdathenry

There was a huge group for today’s class where we took the Shape block from last week and built an amazing Twister project out of it.

We learnt:

more about angles and Sine and Cos
some basics of creating 3D illusions on a computer screen

Twister Notes Week Two.

We didn’t get it quite finished, but managed to get to some 3D. Follow the notes to get to the end and check out this sample project that has all the pieces from the doc and a few extra features in. It’s addictive playing with the twister!

Download the completed project here!

CoderDojo Athenry

Monthly Archives: October 2015