Ronan’s game
In the Python Games group today we continued working on our ping pong games. We will spend another session on them.
There won’t be any Python Games session next Saturday the 31st of January but we will be back the following Saturday the 07th of February.
Alaidhs game
As we have covered most of the concepts required to make games using Pygame I won’t be doing any more slideshows instead we will spend all of our time writing games from now on. Today we started to make a very simple Ping Pong game and we will spend another session or two finishing it.
Anybody who has missed a few sessions is always welcome back, but now would be a great time to return as we will be explaining everything from the beginning again.
Today in the python games group we learned more about moving our sprites. We used the Pygame rotate method to rotate our sprites and we used trigonometry to control our sprites movement. We started working on a ping pong game which we will finish next week. Here is our example code from today and my slides are available here python session_9
Apologies for the delay in posting the notes from yesterday. In the Python Games group we finally finished our Ocean Cleaner game which we are looking forward to demonstrating to everybody next Saturday.
In order to finish our game we had to learn about adding audio and health bars. The demo code we used is available on Dropbox here and our completed Ocean Cleaner game is available here. Here are my slides python session_8
Today the Python games group explored one of the most important things used in graphical computer games, collision detection. We also investigated the use of lists and for loops to manipulate sprites in our games. Our demo code is available here.
We are still working on our ocean game and we will add audio next week.
These are my slides from today python session_7
Last week we relocated to NUIG for a Massive Open Dojo Session. There was lots going on to enjoy and it was great to see such a large turn out. Well done to our own Michael Madden and to Karl Sweeney from CoderDojo Galway City for organizing it all. Thanks also to Martha for the t-shirts.
The ninjas from the Python Games group who attended didn’t do any new coding but they enjoyed personalizing the Bunnies And Badgers game with their own images. We were set a challenge to create a game to highlight the environmental issues facing the oceans. We started working on that today and we will continue with that for a few weeks. 
Before we started working on that today we had a look at some basic Python concepts contained in this demo program. Next week we will look at using lists and for loops in Pygame and at collision detection.
Here are my slides from today python session_6
From Saturday 11 Oct 2014, we are starting a new season of CoderDojo Athenry, at our usual time and place. (The Saturday before, on 4 Oct, we will be having an introduction session for new mentors and other volunteers.)
Here is a the overview presentation (PDF): 1-CoderDojoAthenry-InfoSession-2014-Sept
This season, we will have the following streams:
We look forward to seeing you there!
– Michael and the CoderDojo Athenry mentors.
We awarded a record number of 87 belts at CoderDojo Athenry in May 2014:
In keeping with the CoderDojo ethos, these belts were earned by our young people meeting agreed standards in different coding disciplines. Belts are not for winning competitions against each other, but celebrate personal achievement, and are never given away without being earned.
Congratulations to all the young people who earned their belts!
Sorry for not posting for a while but as the group have been working on their own games for the past few weeks we haven’t looked at any new concepts.
This weekend we discussed awarding Belts. There are three belts available white, yellow and blue.
White belts are for ninjas who have attended at least five sessions and know how to get started with Idle.
Yellow belts are for ninjas who can demonstrate a basic understanding of coding with Python.
Blue belts will be awarded to ninjas who are more skilled coders.
Anybody who has attended more than five python sessions is entitled to apply for a belt so don’t worry if you haven’t attended for a while you can still get a belt.
Here are my slides from this week Belts.
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.
CoderDojo Athenry 