Welcome to App Inventor

Posted on March 30, 2014 by cdathenry

Today we are going to use App Inventor to create Android apps. App Inventor is created by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) who are the same people who created Scratch.

App Inventor is browser based and the projects are stored entirely in a cloud at MIT.

Currently the supported browsers are:

Mozilla Firefox 3.6 or higher
Note: If you are using Firefox with the NoScript extension, you’ll need to turn the extension off. See the note on the troubleshooting page.
Apple Safari 5.0 or higher
Google Chrome 4.0 or higher
Microsoft Internet Explorer is not supported.

App Inventor works on the following Operating Systems

Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
Mac OS X 10.5 or higher
GNU/Linux: Ubuntu 8 or higher, Debian 5 or higher

The following slides cover the steps to install Firefox and the App Inventor software.

Week 1 – How to install App Inventor

The following slides cover the steps to update the App Inventor software.

Week 1 – How to update App Inventor

Once the software has been installed we will create our 1st app using App Inventor.

Week 1 – Speaking App

Web Development – Week 5

Posted on March 4, 2014 by cdathenry

Hi all, This weeks notes show you how to place a link to a YouTube video inside your webpage! Visitors to your website can see the video playing directly on your web page, the notes also have a look at what ‘HTTP’ is, it stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Don’t let the name put you off though, it’s really just like a language that computer use to talk over the internet. Remember if you have any questions my email address is on the last slide of the notes and I am at Coderdojo Athenry on Saturdays! WebsiteDevelopment5

Web Development – Making text bold and italics!

Posted on February 10, 2014 by cdathenry

Hi all,

This weeks notes are all about making text bold and using italics. In the notes we learn about these new tags and add them to the Coderdojo Athenry information page we have been working on. As we go along we can add what we have learned to this webpage! Next week we will learn more tags! Remember if you have any questions to just send me an email, my email address is in the notes! Here are this weeks notes! WebsiteDevelopment4

Python Beginners – Driving Game

Posted on February 9, 2014 by cdathenry

This week we looked at code for the bare bones of a race car game.
We started off by just moving a block around the screen and then rotating it. Then we figured out how to drive it around the screen.
Finally, we looked at how to give the impression of movement to our car sprite by scrolling the track around behind it.
For next week I want the Python group to look at Scratch Beginners week 2 and week 3 as we are going to attempt the same thing in Pygame.
You can find our code from this week here.

Website Development Week 3

Posted on February 2, 2014 by cdathenry

Hi All,

This week the notes are mostly a refresher because a lot of ground has been covered in the last two weeks and I want to give a chance to anybody who wants to start learning HTML a chance to catch up. The notes just recap what we have done so far and also explain why it’s not a good idea to use Microsoft Word to make our HTML files! The notes also show that there are some excellent websites on the internet for learning HTML. You can type the HTML on one side, and see what kind of page this code creates on the other. This is super for experimenting with the different HTML tags so give it a go! When I went around to the classes this week some people did mention to me that they were interested in learning HTML, remember if you ever have any questions feel free to email me or talk to me at the Coderdojo every Saturday!

Here are this weeks notes!

James

Python Beginners – Space Defender

Posted on February 1, 2014 by cdathenry

Today in the Python group we looked at how a few simple changes can change the look and feel of a game. Our space Defender game uses code recycled from last weeks Bunnies And Badgers game combined with a few new sprites to make a completely new game. We also looked at how to use Geometry when moving sprites around the screen.

movex=math.cos(angle_z)*10

movey=math.sin(angle_z)*10

xpos+=movex

ypos-=movey

The above code calculates how many pixels the x and y coordinates of our sprite needs to be changed for it to move 10 pixels in the direction of angle_z. You can learn more about Sin and Cos here.

Python Beginners – Bunnies and Badgers

Posted on January 26, 2014 by cdathenry

Sorry for being a little late putting this up. This week in the Python group we worked on an online tutorial which is available at Beginning Game Programming for Teens with Python. If you copy the folder Bunnies_and_Badgers from Dropbox here onto your own computer it will make getting started a little bit easier.

Website Development 2 – Links, Paragraphs, Headings and Images!

Posted on January 25, 2014 by cdathenry

Hi everybody!

This weeks notes are all about putting headings, paragraphs, links and images on our webpages! Have a look at the notes and play around with the new tags that you can learn from them. If you have any questions just send me an email! My email address is on the last slide of this weeks notes. I am going to be at Gairmscol Mhuire during Coderdojo on Saturdays so you can ask me questions there too!

Here is a link to this weeks notes!

Happy Coding,

James

Web Development 1 – Getting started with HTML

Posted on January 19, 2014 by cdathenry

Hi all, the Web Development stream starts this week. It will run alongside the other streams so you can still learn Scratch, Python or Minecraft Modding on Saturdays and spend a small amount of time learning HTML during the week. HTML is fun and the thing we need most is ideas about how webpages should look or ideas about what to put on them! We can then work together to translate these ideas in to webpages! If you are interested have a look at my presentation on getting started with HTML!

Here is this link to the presentation.