Category Archives: 2016-2017

Week 4 2017 – Explorers – Piano

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Hello everyone,

Thank you all for coming yesterday on such a lovely day.

This week we did a simple Piano.

piano

We only had to draw two keys, and then could duplicate these and change the names. The same applied to the code. The code is the same for each key apart from one small change so the note is the appropriate for the key.

REMEMBER! You need to make four changes each time you duplicate:

Change the name of the spite to the next Note

Change the name of the TWO costumes

Change the NOTE played

Piano2

Piano3

Remember, no sessions for the next two weeks. Have a nice break and for anyone with confirmations to attend next week I hope the weather is extra nice for you.

See you back on the 4th of March

Here are notes from this week in PDF cda-s6-week-4-17-piano.pdf

Martha

Explorers Week 2- 2017, Paint.net

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Hello everyone,

Today we took a look at Paint.net, which is a drawing program. I quickly went through the menus but the best way to learn a program like this is to use it and experiment with it.

PAINTNET

The main reason we looked at it this week was because we will need it next week as we begin our modelling and stop/motion animation. After we take our photos we will be able to “clean them up before we bring them into Scratch as our Sprites.

snake

Next week, if the Moms and Dads could bring along a camera or phone along with the lead to attach these to your laptop.

And of course most important of all bring your imagination!

Here the full notes from todays session in PDF form. cda-s6-week-2-17-learnaboutpainting.pdf

Creators – Unity Terrain

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Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 22.17.05.png

This week we looked at the Environment asset pack and the creation of terrains.

Terrains are, at their core, nothing more than a grayscale image (shades of black & white) where the colour values are interpreted as representing heights. Black is is interpreted as zero height, white is interpreted as maximum height (as defined in the terrain’s properties) and every shade of grey in-between represents an intermediate value. The terrain editing tools provides brushes in a variety of shapes to raise or lower the terrain as desired.

Terrains in Unity don’t just allow us to define their heights. They also allow the painting of the terrain with a combination of different textures. In the Environment asset pack there are a selection of useful textures for painting a natural looking environment. These are a grass texture, several rocky textures and a sand texture.

Screen Shot 2017-01-31 at 22.18.36.png

Trees and grass are also enclosed in the Environment asset pack. These are also painted onto the texture with a brush, or in the case of trees, autofilled to a requested total number.

Once we had our terrain built, we added a character controller from the Controllers asset pack to enable us to walk around in it. We finished the session experimenting with the water prefabs that come with the Environment pack.

Please note that I won’t be at Dojo next Saturday (4th Feb 2017). Nonetheless, you are welcome to attend and join another group for the day if you wish to do so.

Creators – Unity Standard Assets

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This week, in a fun and pretty free-form session, we looked at the Unity standard assets packs to get an appreciations of the wealth of valuable content they contain. 
We looked first at the Characters asset pack and tried the first-person, third-person and car controllers. 

We also used the Prototyping pack to place some basic house shapes and other basic level layout in our scene. 

Finally we played around with some of the effects in the Particles pack to see what was available there. 

Next week we will continue with another a session in a similar vein and explore the Environment assets pack and the creation of terrains to model exterior spaces. 

All ninjas are encouraged this week to play around with the standard assets, time permitting, and we may look next week at anything you’ve managed to create. 

Explorers – Maths Game

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Welcome back everyone and Happy New Year

We had a great day in Coder Dojo on Saturday! We did a huge amount of work developing a maths game in the Explorers group.CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-how to

  1. The player picks a level of difficulty and the computer chooses 2 random numbers to add (subtract or multiply- whichever you choose!) together and show the numbers to the player. For this we needed 2 SPRITES and 4 VARIABLES called SCORE, LEVEL, NUMBER1 and NUMBER2 as well as 2 BACKDROPS. CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-ask questions1CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-ask questions
  2. The player then has to enter an answer to the equation and the computer tells them whether they are wrong or right. CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-decisions alternative end
  3. We repeated the ask/answer questions 5 or 10 times.

We didn’t get to finish our game but we will next before we start learning Paint.net

See can you figure it out for yourself:

We will have a second sprite who reacted positively to correct answers BROADCAST and negatively to wrong answers BROADCAST. You can use whatever sprites you like and change their look whatever way you like.CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-sprite 2After all the questions were asked we will have  the 1st Sprite SAY – Game Over! and BROADCAST Game over so that the backdrop changed and music played. There are two ways to change the backdrop- see below!CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-alt backdrop CDA-S5-Challenge_10-Maths game-backdropCan you improve our game??! Can you figure out how to subtract or multiply instead of add? Can you get the computer to add three numbers together or give the user 3 level options like: easy, medium or hard?

The notes for the Maths Game are here:  cda-s6-week_1_17-mathsgame.pdf

See you all next week and don’t forget to Download Paint.net at         WWW.GETPAINT.NET

Martha

Congratulations to Alaidh Fox and Roy Flaherty on their BT Young Scientist Projects!

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Huge congratulations to members of CoderDojo Athenry who participated in the BT Young Scientists Exhibition 2017 recently!

Alaidh Fox, a junior mentor at CoderDojo Athenry, and her friend Deirdre Hughes entered The Hox Project – Using RFID technology to advance medicine, which supports elderly and visually impaired people to take medication safely, with an audio device that can read labels and a separate wristband containing a patient’s entire medical history.

Roy Flaherty from CoderDojo Athenry, with his friend Gavin McGinley, entered the Arcade Cabinet project that brings new life to classic video games through the use of the Raspberry Pi and an Arduino-driven joystick.

If anybody else was also there, please let us know and send me a photo so we can post it.

These two teams did exceptionally well:

  • Roy and Gavin won First Place in the Junior Technology category
  • Alaidh and Deirdre won First Place place Intermediate Technology category and also won of the HPRA (Health Products Regulatory Authority) Award

Well done! We are all very proud of you at CoderDojo Athenry!

CoderDojo Athenry Resumes on 21 Jan 2017

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happy-new-year-2017s

Happy New Year 2017 from the CoderDojo Athenry mentors!

CoderDojo Athenry resumes on 21 January 2017 (1 week later than usual). We have lots of great tech and coding projects activities planned for 2017.

New members are always welcome, so feel free to bring a friend along. And we have some laptops for loan, so you don’t need to one to join in.

As always, we will be based in Clarin College Athenry from 12:00 to 2pm on Saturdays. More information here: https://coderdojoathenry.org/about/

Dick Baldwin’s Little Sailboats

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coderdojo-sailboatspresentation-dec2016

We had a great presentation by 3 people last Saturday in our first-ever transatlantic link-up, with 140 people in attendance at CoderDojo Athenry:

  • Dick Baldwin, live via Skype from Maine USA, telling us about his Little Sailboats project, Educational Passages, in which they have released about 70 5-foot-long sailboats onto the open seas, to get picked up across the world
  • Meabh who found one of the boats in Connemara, with her mom Neasa
  • Margaret Rae from the Marine Institute in Galway, who will be helping to re-launch the boat in the Spring.

Here are some more links that you might find interesting:

Thanks to Margaret from the Marine Institute and Ariadne from Educational Passages for the links!

Creators – Finishing Pin Bowling

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This week, despite a small group, we finished off the Pin Bowling game. After Christmas we’ll move onto a different game – most likely something 1st person in design.

UI Elements – Text and Buttons

We added two UI Text elements to our game and aligned them to the top left and top right hand corners respectively. One is used for showing the current score and one is used for showing the number of shots remaining. Note that when we add UI elements, Unity automatically adds a Canvas and an EventSystem for us.

UI elements don’t have a standard Transform component, instead they have a RectTransform component which is used to describe their position within their Canvas. To align to a particular location we click on the square below the words “Rect Transform” and select how we’d like to align within the Canvas by clicking one of the options while holding the Shift and Alt keys to set both the pivot and position.

screen-shot-2016-11-29-at-22-41-48

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Week 9, Explorers – Pen Commands

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Hello Everyone,

Thank you all for coming again this week. This week we looked at pen commands, we have not done this before in the Explorers group so it was new for everyone.

pencommand

We also created some variables which we set as sliders which again is something we had not done before with this group.sliders

And lastly we added buttons to our game. We added two separate buttons, a Start and Stop.

Here are the full Pdf version of my notes from this weeks session. cda-s6-challenge-pen-command.pdf

Martha