Author Archives: Declan Fox

Bodgers – A Look Back At 2020/2021

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Hello everyone,

I would like to thank all the Bodgers who joined me this year. I really enjoyed the sessions and I’m really grateful to you all for your attention, patience and your willingness to help me and each other out.

It’s a pity we couldn’t get together for even one session but hopefully when CoderDojo Athenry gets back to in person sessions I can meet you all then. I would also like to invite you all to our first post-COVID pizza party (hopefully before Christmas).

I have put together a video of the games we made this year.

Special thanks to everyone who created levels for our Red Runner game. You can find a copy of the code and images for this game on Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sj6hil242d3fxmk/AAAHPnEVjw5IGWqs_G3eTXkDa?dl=0.

Thanks also to Kevin who helped us get up and running.

Enjoy the summer and hopefully I’ll see you in the autumn.

Declan

CoderDojo Athenry Information Session 07-Nov-2020

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Hello again everyone.

It was great to speak to you all last Saturday.

Here are some notes with information all about CoderDojo Athenry in PDF form.

coderdojoathenry-infosession-2020Download

Here’s a quick recap of everyone’s notes;

Martha told us all about the Explorers group, you can contact Martha at Martha@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com and you can find her slides here.

online-sessions_week_01_information-sessionDownload

Oliver spoke about the Advancers group and you can contact Oliver at Oliver@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com

I talked about the Bodgers group, you contact me at Declan@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com and you can read all about the Bodgers group here.

bodgers-2020-2021-1Download

Kieran then spoke about the Modellers group. Here is his presentation.

coderdojoathenry-modellers-kickoff-nov2020Download

Kieran can be contacted at Kieran@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com.

Finally Michael spoke about the Hacker Group which will be starting in the new year. Here are his slides

hackers-intro-2020Download

Mike’s email is, yes you guessed it is, Mike@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com

We will be posting information for our first session next Saturday in the next day or two, so keep an eye out for that.

Looking forward to seeing you all again next Saturday.

Declan and the CoderDojo Athenry Mentors

COVID19 (coronavirus) Update

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Hi All

As you all know Clarin College is closed until at least 29-Mar-2020, as a result we will not be able to run CoderDojo Athenry until the school reopens.

The CoderDojo Foundation have also announced that the Coolest Projects Showcase that was scheduled to take place on 06-Jun-2020 in the RDS has been cancelled. 

We will keep you updated by email, on Facebook, Twitter and here if the situation changes.

Enjoy St.Patrick’s weekend.

Declan

Advancers – The Greenhouse Effect

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2018GreenhouseEffect

This week in Advancers we looked at the Greenhouse Effect which is a process that occurs when gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap the Sun’s heat. This process makes Earth much warmer than it would be without an atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is one of the things that makes Earth a comfortable place to live.

We started by creating sprites for the Earth, atmosphere, space, the Sun and we used an arrow to represent the flow of heat from the Sun to the Earth and back out to space. We used a costume change on the heat sprite to represent the difference between shortwave radiation from the Sun (yellow) and longwave radiation from the Earth(red).

demo

We made our own blocks so we could reuse some of our scripts and we used the Clone blocks to give the effect of a stream of arrows flowing from the Sun to Earth and back out to space.

scripts

Oliver will be back when we return on 09-Nov-2019.

See you all then, happy Halloween!

Declan and Eoin

Advancers – Spirals

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This week Eoin led the Advancers group, we looked at drawing in Scratch, using the Pen blocks and some simple maths to draw some patterns.

As always, we started with a Plan:

A Plan

  1. A Button Sprite – to start the drawing.
  2. A Simple Sprite to do the drawing.
  3. Some maths to make it draw a Spiral

We started by drawing a square, to draw a square in Scratch we used the Pen down, Turn and Move blocks.

To get a spiral effect we had to make sure that we moved a little bit further each time we drew our square.

We also decided that we should be able to make spirals with different shape so we  needed some variables to help:

  • Shape – This would tell us how many sides the Spiral should have
    • We made this in to a Slider on the screen so it was adjustable.
    • Min value was 3 and Max value was 100
  • Degrees – This would tell us how much extra to turn, this made the patterns a lot more interesting.
    • Again, we made this one into a Slider so we could adjust it.
    • Min value was 0 and Max value was 360
  • Size – This was an internal variable, which we used to keep track of how many Steps to move each turn, we also added a little bit to it each turn to make the Spiral pattern.

The drawing Sprite

This was the Sprite that did all the work. To work out how far we should Turn each time, we divided 360 by the number of Sides, we then added the degrees value to get the strange effects working.

The code ended up looking like this:

 

The Button Sprite

We used this sprite to start drawing, we used a broadcast so out button sprite could “talk” to out drawing sprite.

Oliver will be back next Saturday.

See you all then Declan and Eoin

CoderDojo Athenry Information Session, Sept 2019

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Thank you to everyone who came along for our information session yesterday Saturday 14-Sep-2019.info_session

Michael introduced us to the CoderDojo movement and then talked to us about CoderDojo Athenry and what we have planned for 2018/2019. Michael’s presentation is here:CoderDojoAthenry-InfoSession-2019-Sept .

Julie then spoke about our loaner laptops where we provide laptops for people who don’t have their own. Speak to Julie or any of the mentors (we’ll be wearing blue t-shirts) for more information.

Martha then spoke about Health & Safety and our shop, where we sell tea/coffee with biscuits for €2.00 or €1.50 if you bring your own cup, with all profits going towards equipment etc. for our CoderDojo. The H & S and Coffee Shop slides are here: HS-and-Coffee .

info_session1

This year, we have 4 different rooms with different topics in them, for different levels of experience and age.

Explorers- led by Martha for Beginners from around age seven. They use the Scratch programmimg language to build games, quizes and animations. Here are Martha’s slides: CDA-Explorers-S8-Information-Session .

Advancers- led by Oliver is for kids who have already been through Explorers. They tackle more complicated programming concepts, during the year the Avancers group will investigate various topics like gravity, music and even what happens when water boils using Scratch.

Modellers- led by Kieran is for older kids who have been through Explorers and Advancers. The Modellers group will concentrate on making 3D game resources using apps like Blender and Gimp. Here are Kieran’s slides: CoderDojoAthenry-Modellers-KickOff-Sept2019.

Hackers- led by Michael for older teenagers who have been through Creators and Bodgers. The Hackers group themselves usually decide what topics they will cover with many of them working on their own projects. Here are Michael’s slides: Hackers-Intro-Slides.

Kids are free to move between rooms until they find a topic that suits them.

To find our schedule for the 2019/2020 sessions click on the schedule button at the top of this page.

If you have any questions or if you need any help, please talk to me or any of the mentors.

See you all next Saturday.

Declan and the CoderDojo Mentors

CoderDojo Athenry Returns on 14 September 2019!

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return

CoderDojo Athenry is starting back with an information session on 14 September 2019 in Clarin College Athenry (“the Tech”) at 12:00 noon. All new and existing members are welcome to come along to find out what we have planned for this season.

Regular weekly sessions will start the following week, 21 September 2019, 12-2pm in the same venue.

New members are always welcome. If you are aged between 7 and 17, just come along on the first day and fill out a registration form. Young people aged 12 and under have to be accompanied by a parent/guardian for the whole session.

And don’t forget, CoderDojo Athenry is run by volunteers and is completely free for participants — no membership fees, no weekly contributions. You should bring a laptop if you have one, but we have some loaner laptops if you don’t. There is more information on our About page.

We hope you can join us. You are welcome to invite your friends along too!

Congratulations to all our ninjas who received belts in Summer 2019!

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On 2 May 2019, at our final CoderDojo Athenry session of the 2018-19 year, we awarded a total of 75 belts to our ninjas for their great individual achievements in acquiring and demonstrating coding and computing skills. And then we had a party with pizza!

Here is a link to our presentation from the day: CoderDojo Athenry Belts Day 2019

We are very grateful to Clarin College Athenry and the principal, Ciaran Folan, for their enabling CoderDojo Athenry by making the school and its wifi available to us.

We are also very grateful for the sponsorship and support we have received this year:

  • Galway Roscommon Education and Training Board, who provide us with an annual Youth Club Grant
  • Medtronic, employer of our mentor Declan Fox, who provide us with a grant to match Declan’s excellent volunteering
  • HP Enterprise, employer of our mentor Mark Davis, who provide loaner laptops that we make great use of
  • Boston Scientific, employer of our mentor Kevin Madden, who provide us with 3D printers.

 

Thanks also to everyone who supported us by buying tea or coffee!

Because of these supports, no child or parent/guardian ever has to pay to participate in CoderDojo Athenry.

And of course we must thank our mentors, who volunteer their time and expertise entirely without charge week after week, to make CoderDojo Athenry the success that it is.

Here is the full list of belts we awarded:

  • Explorers:    34
  • Advancers:  25
  • Bodgers:     8
  • Hackers:      5
  • Creators:     14
  • Black Belt:   2

Special mention must go to Eoghan McGuinness and Ruaidhri Madden, who received their black belt awards. Both have been in CoderDojo Athenry for several years, working their way up through the groups, and this year started Mentoring. Well done, Eoghan and Ruaidhri!

CoderDojo Athenry is now closed for the summer. See you all in September!

Bodgers –Magic Ball

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This week in the Bodgers group we revisited Pygame Zero and worked on a fortune telling game based on a Magic 8 ball.

I gave the group some artwork I prepared in the Paint.NET graphics editor and we wrote some code to animate them.

I’ve added the code and images to Dropbox here.

See you all on Saturday for Belts and Pizza, don’t forget to bring drinks.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh.