Well done to everybody at CoderDojo Athenry who participated in Minevention 2016 in the Radisson Hotel Galway on 26 and 27 November.

Our stand looked great, with the Pi-based games console, a TV showing the Athenry Castle Minecraft model, the Oculus Rift demoing a Unity game, one of the Bodger’s robots, members with their laptops demoing Scratch programs and Minecraft modding, and a 3D printer on the first day.

We were very proud of our ninjas who are fantastic ambassadors for CoderDojo! Thank you for all of your great work!

In addition, thanks very much to Lisa O’Brien and the Minevention team for allowing us to participate, and for inviting me to give a presentation about CoderDojo.

We will have what should be a very interesting set of speakers at CoderDojo Athenry on 3 December for the second half of the session (starting around 1pm).

Dick Baldwin, a sailor based in Maine, USA, sends 5 foot long unmanned, GPS monitored sailboats out into the sea. Recently, one of the little sail boats, Lancer, arrived in Ireland and was picked up by 8 year old primary schoolgirl Méabh in Leitir Móir, Connemara. Her school hopes to relaunch it next year, with the help of The Marine Institute.

We will have interactive presentations via Skype from Dick Baldwin and Ariadne Dimoulas of the Educational Passages project, and Méabh will come along in person to tell us about finding the boat. In addition, Dr Margaret Rae of the Marine Institute (who is a CoderDojo Athenry mom!) will be on hand to explain more about the project and maybe answer your questions about what the Marine Institute does and how important technology is for its research.

Below is a summary of the presentation. It should be really interesting! Thanks a million to Margaret and the Marine Institute for setting this up.

One never knows what’s going to happen when a small boat goes to sea. This presentation is about sending 5foot unmanned, GPS monitored sailboats out into the sea where every voyage is different and the learning opportunities are great. These little sailboats follow the winds and currents and will sail for months & months often crossing oceans and reporting its position and scientific data along the way. 

A group like yours could equip a boat with an array of scientific sensors to monitor atmospheric and ocean data. You could also include a solar panel and maybe a camera or possibly even add steering capabilities to your boat. Think of the data you could collect and what it would be like when your boat comes ashore in far- away lands. Will you be able to communicate with them and what would you ask them to do with our boat?  Let’s explore the possibilities.

Click “Run Pen” followed by “Edit on Codepen” to view the game and play with the code.  At this stage, codepen has been working well for us so I think it’s a really good idea for you all to register for an account on codepen.  This will allow you to “copy” my sketches so you can save your versions of them online.  As we get more advanced (or if the network is down), we will start working locally with Atom again but this is good for us.

Today we started writing our first javascript game.  We thought for a bit about which game might be good to start and decided on a version of the hit game Flappy Bird.  We got quite far before people started to tire!

It will take another session to finish the game – we might do this next week, or take a break from javascript and come back to it in the new year.

Writing the Game

The first step was to plan how we would do the game.  Like all projects, we build it up in steps.  These steps would work to build a basic flappy bird:

Step 1: Draw the sky

Step 2: Draw the ground

Step 3: Draw the bird

Step 4: Make the bird fall

Step 5: Make the bird stop falling when it hits the ground

Step 6: Make the bird jump/flap when the mouse pressed / screen touched

Step 7: Add pipes as obstacles with a random gap

Step 8: Move the pipes towards the bird

Step 9: When the pipes go offscreen on the left, make them appear on the right again

Step 10: Check if the pipe is hitting the bird and restart of it does

Step 11: Add a distance label (how many pipes have we passed)

Step 12: Add sound, improve the graphics and keep a “high” score

We got as far as Step 6.  The next 6 steps would need another week to cover.  I’ve added comments to the code so you can see which parts of the code relate to which steps.  If you have your own codepen account, it might be a good idea to attempt to do the rest of the game – you might get stuck but that’s part of the fun!

New Concepts we covered today:

• Variables.  Variables in javascript are just like variables in scratch.  The key things about variable are:
  • You create a new variable by writing the word “var” followed by the variable name.  E.g. we wrote the variables:
    • var birdHeight;
    • var gravity = 0.5;
    • Creating a variable by writing the word “var” is called “declaring” a variable.
  • You can change the value of a variable by using “=”
    • birdHeight = 10;
  • You can also use a variable name in assignment, so e.g. we could make the birdHeight 1 bigger by writing:
    • birdHeight = birdHeight + 1;
  • We learned that if you want to be able to see a variable everywhere, we need to declare it
• Math operators:
  • We learned that some of these are written a bit differently in computer programs:
    • / is how we write “divided by” – e.g. width/2 is the same as writing “width divided by two”.  This is because on a keyboard for some reason there isn’t the ÷ symbol.
    • * is how we write “multiplied by” e.g. 2 * 2 is the same as writing “two multiplied by two”.  This is because x is very easy to confuse with lowercase x.  So if you had a variable called x things would get confusing!