Hi everyone,

Good to see so many of you there again on Saturday.

At the start of the session, I talked about what will be happening on April the 12th when we will be awarding belts. If you have any questions or are unsure about anything, please ask me in the next session.

This week we again tried to use all the coding fundementals we have learned so far, such as loops, decisions, animation etc., and put them into a new game. Unlike last week though where the game was an action game this weeks was more of a brain teaser/maths game.

Next week, you are going to work on the game that you will show to us the following week. We will be on hand to help you along if you have any questions.

Looking forward to seeing all your great ideas!

The full notes from this weeks sessions are here in PDF form CDA-S3-MathsGame

Hi Everyone,

Thank you all for coming again this week and thank you to Oliver for taking the session for the two weeks I was away.

I briefly spoke about Belts last week and we will go into that further in this coming session.

I tried to do a game this week that was jammed packed with everything you have learned so far, Loops, decisions, variables, broadcasting and animation.

It was quite a lot to fit in but I think we managed it. If any of you are having problems with your code, we can take a look at it before our next session, or have a look through this weeks notes and see can you figure it out yourself.

Here are this weeks notes in PDF: CDA-S3-Wipeout

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

Hello Everyone,

Thank you all for coming again this week, and thank you all for your generous donations.

I think the Mic made a big difference this week!          

This week we looked at pen commands, we have not done this before in the Scratch Beginners so it was new for everyone.

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

And lastly we added buttons to our game. We added two separate buttons, a Start and Stop. In a few weeks time, I will show you how to have just one button, changing costume and activating the appropriate code.

There is no Coderdojo in Athenry next week, so enjoy the break.
I will be away for the following two weeks but Oliver has kindly offered to take over the group, along with his own.

Here are the full Pdf version of my notes from this weeks session. CDA-S3-Challenge-Pen Command.pdf

Martha

Hi everyone,

We completed our Mario game this week. We coded Mario so that he always floated down on to the wall. We added a fraction of a second of a wait so that it appears that he floats as he comes down. This also allows time for you to navigate left or right as needed.

We also introduced a more advanced concept, the Parallax effect, whereby objects further away appear to move slower than objects nearer. We coded mountains and a Sun to demonstrate this.

Next week, everyone is going to start on there own games, using the code and concepts we have learnt over the last couple of weeks, so bring your imagination with you.

You will a full version of the my notes in pdf form here.CDA-S3-Challenge09-Scrolling.pdf

See you all next week

Martha

Happy New Year!

CoderDojo Athenry is starting back up for 2014 on Saturday 18 January 2014. As always, it is on from noon in Gairmscoil Mhuire VEC school in Athenry.

New members are welcome to join us: Martha and Julie in Scratch Beginners will have a special area for new members, and new people are welcome in the other streams also. The mentors and other ninjas can help you get up to speed. If you have not been with us before, here is some more information: https://cdathenry.wordpress.com/about/

You are also welcome to return if you were with us previously but could not attend for some weeks in the run up to Christmas, and the mentors and other ninjas will help you catch up and settle back in.

We will continue with the streams that we had before Christmas:

1. Beginners/Intermediate Scratch
2. Advanced Scratch (for ninjas who have been through the Beginner/Intermediate stream)
3. Beginners Python
4. Minecraft Modders (aimed at those who are older and/or have completed Scratch Advanced – Java modding this term)
5. Website Development: this is running in parallel with the weekly sessions

We look forward to seeing you there for some more great sessions!

Michael and the CoderDojo Athenry mentors.

WordPress.com prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Christmas is coming and CoderDojo Athenry is coming to an end for 2013, with our final session of the year on Saturday 14 December from 12:00. We will of course resume in January – keep an eye on the mailing list for exact dates.

Even if you missed one or two recent sessions, please do join us for our last session of the year, which will be a very special one: our ninjas from each of the different groups will demonstrate what they have been working on and then we will have a party with pizza and drinks!

For the first part of the session, each of the groups will have about 15 minutes during which ninjas from the group will demonstrate what they have been working on, in this order:

1. Scratch Beginners
2. Scratch Advanced
3. Python Beginners
4. Minecraft Modders

And don’t worry: we won’t put any ninja on the spot – nobody has to speak unless they would like to.

After the demos, we will all have a party!

Some parents have contacted us to offer to bring something for the party – thank you for your very kind offers, but Ciaran Folan and Gairmscoil Mhuire school are arranging the food, for which we are very grateful. Thank you, Ciaran, and of course huge thanks to you and the school for so generously hosting CoderDojo Athenry every week.

By the way, in case you are wondering about when we will be awarding belts this season, we will do that at the last session before Easter.

We hope you had a great Halloween!

As you know, we took a break last weekend for the bank holiday. This weekend we are back and will be at our usual location from 12:00 on Saturday 2 November.

If you don’t receive email messages and would like to, please contact us at coderdojoathenry@gmail.com.