Explorers Week 04 – Dino Finder!

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Martha Fahy

Hello everyone,

Thank you again to you all for coming on Saturday and I hope you all had fun, which is what Coderdojo Athenry is all about!

We had some great new code to learn and to use all our coding concepts we have learned so far.

For the first time we wrote code to control our sprite, rather than it moving randomly as it did last week. For this we took a look at X,Y, axis and used this rather than the steps.

We also used our sensing blocks for the first time as we wanted something to happen when our character went off the path.

Here are the notes from this weeks session in PDF CDA-S8-Week_04-DinoHunter.PDF

See you next week.

Martha

Julie, Iseult, Eoin and Ruaidhrí

Explorers Week 03 – Our first Game – Balloon Ninja!

Posted on September 29, 2019 by Martha Fahy

Hi everyone,

Great to see you all yesterday and I hope you enjoyed creating your first game in scratch.

its important to take a moment to make a plan, in the long term it will save you time if you have a clear idea of what you want to create.

I didn’t make it easy on you and we went straight into learning about variables to create our score and lives.

I saw some fantastic games around the room with Dinosaurs and Doughnuts and Unicorns, much better ideas than I could ever come up with.

I gave you the option of whether you wanted to add a time or not. It is a piece of could yo can add to any of your games as it can add a sense of tension or urgency to a game.

Here are the notes from this week in PDF CDA-S8 Week_03_BallonNinja.PDF

Thanks again for coming and see you next week.

Martha

Julie, Iseult, Eoin and Ruaidhrí

Explorers Week 01 – Getting to know Scratch

Posted on September 23, 2019 by cdathenry

Hello everyone

Welcome to Coderdojo Athenry and the Explorers group! It was great to see so many new faces on Saturday and of course I’m always delighted to see those you are back for another year!

We just spent a short time familarising our self with Scratch and where we can find the code and some small examples od how we can use them. We will start a new game this coming week and will jump straight in using variables, loops and decision statements.

Here are the notes from last week. CDA-S8 Week_02-YourNameinLights.pdf

Martha

Julie, Iseult, Cara, Ruaidhrí and Eoin

Explorers Week 10 – Scrolling Backgrounds

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Martha Fahy

Hi everyone

Thank you to everyone who came on Saturday.

We did scrolling backgrounds and this is very useful in any type of game and can add an extra dimension to your game whether its a driving game or a flying game.

We were scrolling horizontally so we were using the xpos but remember you can just as easily scrolling vertically by just using the ypos

Here are the notes in PDF form

CDA-S8 Week_10-scrollingbackgrounds.pdf

Enjoy the long weekend and we will see you all the week after.

Martha

Julie, Eoin and Ruaidhrí

Explorers – Stop Motion

Posted on April 8, 2019 by cdathenry

Stop Motion Stop Motion is used to make cartoons and animated movies like Wallace & Grommet, you take lots of pictures moving the characters and objects a little bit between each picture. Once you have the pictures you can link … Continue reading →

Week 4 – 2019 – Explorers

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Martha Fahy

Hello everyone.

Good to see everyone there on Saturday. We finished our game from the previous week, similar to on old game called Breakout.

We used a number of important coding concepts again this week, loops and decisions, Variables, broadcasting, etc.

Don’t forget we are off for the next two weeks. Enjoy the Break!

Here is a link to the notes: CDA-S8_Week 8-Wipeout.pdf

Martha

Week 3 2019 Explorers – Greeting Card

Posted on January 30, 2019 by Martha Fahy

Hi everyone,

Good to see everyone again this week

This week we did a Greeting Card, I did a birthday card but some of you did Thank You Cards and New Dog Cards!

Here are this weeks notes in cda-s8-week 3-greetingcard.pdf

See you Next Week

Martha

Julie Ruaidhrí and Eoin

Explorers – Doubling

Posted on January 14, 2019 by cdathenry

Introduction

For our first day back in 2019 we decided to do a simple Paper folding program.

It doesn’t really fold paper though, it just shows you how thick the paper gets when you keep folding it in half! It will get very thick quite quickly!

So we Googled, how thick is a sheet of Paper and we got the number 0.1mm, so quite thin really!

We then Googled a list of items and their heights, so we could write out a message when we reached that height, this was the list we came up with [and a guess of how many folds it would take]:

Paper: 0.1mm
Baby: 530mm
Human: 2 Meters [50]
Dublin Spire: 121m
Croagh Patrick: 764m
Burj Khaleefa: 828m [10,000]
Carauntoohill: 1038m [1 billion]
Mount Everest: 8848m
Galway to America: 6603km [25]
Space: 100km
Moon:300,000km
Mars: 56,000,000 km
Sun: 150,000,000 km
Pluto: 7,500,000,000 KM

The Program

In order to keep track of how many folds we have done and what height the paper has reached we needed a few variables:

We store the number of folds, and the height in mm, meters and kilometers.

folds – to store how many times we have folded the paper
mm – to store the height in milimetres
metre – to store the height in metres
km – to store the height in kilometres

variables

We then made sure that they were all set to the correct value when the Green Flag was clicked.

greenflag

The only one that is not zero is the height in mm which we set the thickness of paper 0.1

Now we can get coding.

We used the Up and Down arrows to fold/unfold the Paper, this would increase/decrease the number of folds and the mm height and then Broadcast to the code that checked everything else.

upanddownarrows

The code that does the checking needs a few IF’s to work out what to do. First of all though it needs to calculate the height in Metres and Kilometres as well.

We used the number of folds to work out if we should be checking the mm, metre or km variable. All we did when we got to a particular height was to Say something on the Screen, but you could do anything you want at these points in the code, maybe show a different sprite or make a sound or something.

This is the code that checked the mm and metre variables

mmandmetre

and this is the code that checked the metre and km variables

metreandkm

And if anyone wants the full project, it is availabe on the scratch.mit.edu web site:

User: cdexplorers1819
Password: exploreres1819
Project: Doubling

Explorers Week 9 – Maths Game

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Martha Fahy

Hi everyone,

You all did great work on Saturday, there was some quite complex thinking to be done to figure it out but you did great!

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. Fr this we needed 2 SPRITES and 4 VARIABLES called SCORE, LEVEL, NUMBER1 and NUMBER2 as well as 2 BACKDROPS.
The player then has to enter an answer to the equation and the computer tells them whether they are wrong or right.
We repeated the ask/answer questions 5 or 10 times. Can you figure out where the REPEAT loop fits?
We also had 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. One coder added a puppy as their second and had him bark whenever an answer was correct.
After all the questions were asked we had 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-S8-Week_9_18-MathsGame.pdfCan 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: