This week our teams started coding their their projects for the Pioneers challenge.
The Zombie Trolls and the Zombie Herders started by playing audio for their Raspberry Pi projects using Pygame.
The green fingers spent the session trying out sensors for their Arduino based project like this DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor. They also got a soil moisture sensor and a float switch working.
We also got some great news from Twitter before the session.
Here is a picture of the mystery box.
I don’t know what the mystery is, it looks like a cardboard box to me 🙂
This week the creator crew learned some of the most important things for coding and we managed to build quite a useful app while we were at it! For those that missed this week, we handed out two sheets which … Continue reading →
Great week again with huge crowds but thanks to our new room layout and a couple of Health and Safety issues sorted, I think it was a more comfortable and safe environment for everyone. Thank you to Niamh, Sarah, Roisin , Alan and Pete you came early and helped sort out the new layout.
This week, I helped Bo Peep found her sheep! Some of you did the same and some used ideas like Minecraft Steve finding Iron Ore and Diamonds, Knights finding dragons or a Princess finding flowers.
Before we even started our game this week we talked a little bit about File Management and about the importance of keeping your files somewhere you can access them quickly and giving them a meaningful name.
So to this end, we all created a folder where we will be keeping our files in the future and within that we had a sub folder for this weeks files.
We started our game by drawing our background on our stage:
Rather than use the sprites from the Scratch Library, we searched the internet using a image search for our Sprites.
This week, we decided to move our main sprite using the arrow keys. For this we had to learn a small bit about the X and Y axis and I gave you a little tip on how to remember which is which!
Hope you all enjoyed this week, next week we have a very small bit to finish off for this game and then we will start a new game!
Today in Creators, we built on our HTML example of last week and added in some Javascript so we could start coding. We then learnt how to separate our javascript into different files and folders. At the end of all … Continue reading →
Can you believe the crowds we had again last week, another record 251 Ninjas and Parents attended Coderdojo Athenry last week.
We were adding to and improving our game from last week. We added a sprite that would catch the fish and decided what could or would happen when this occurred.
We discussed how to make a game more fun we have to add some complexity to it….we need to make it harder to play!! so to this end we used some code from our operator palette to add some randomness.
I also introduced Variables and how we can use them to keep track of things like Score or Lives.
We started today’s session by looking at 3-D Modeling using FreeCAD. FreeCAD allows us to build complex 3-D designs using primitive shapes like cubes and cylinders. You can download FreeCAD from here and the video below will help you get started.
Our teams have finished deciding what they are going to work on for the Raspberry Pi Pioneers Challenge and they also have picked team names.
At the Hackers group, we started learning how to use 3D printers this week. 3D printers are a fantastic technology for turning 3D computer models into physical objects. They are also impressively inexpensive. For example, one of the printers we are using, the Arduino-based Materia 101 printer, costs about €600.
Thanks to Kevin’s employer, Boston Scientific, who have loaned two 3D printers to us and are also covering the cost of the plastic “ink” used in them.
Here are Kevin’s notes on how to set up a 3D printer: 3d-printer-setup (PDF)
Understanding the internet! There was great excitement in CoderDojo Athenry as we got started in the creators group. This week we started off by chatting about the internet and talked about how it actually works – we learned: That “Servers” … Continue reading →
Wow! what a fantastic turnout on Saturday for our first week back this year. We had our highest recorded numbers in the Dojo this week. 245 Ninjas and Parents, incredible.
Our little old room had 130 alone, so probably over 80 of you Ninjas came to start coding and make your first game. I hope you had a good time, I know that I really enjoyed it. There was a really great atmosphere and energy in the room.
Please take a look at them as they contain details on each of the palettes that we didn’t go into fully on Saturday. It also contains all the code for each sprite in case you missed any part.
We will continue to add to the game next week but don’t worry if you weren’t here this week, I will have a copy of the game so that you can join in.
Don’t forget, anyone can join at any stage, let your friends know how much fun your are having.
We started today’s session with some information about the group and our plans for the year ahead.
We spoke about Digital Making, Digital Makers use technology to make something and learn about that technology while doing so. Technology available to Digital makers includes Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Fritzing, Sensors, Displays, 3D Printing and basic components.
Our Philosophy in the Bodgers group is that the most important thing is to get the project working. We don’t worry about how secure, how robust or how pretty our project is as long as it works long enough to show it works and that we understand how it works. We will use whatever resources we can get our hands on, online tutorials, online code, cheap components and cheap and easily available materials.
This year we will focus on projects, I will do some demos but there won’t be classroom type sessions. We would like you to work in teams. We will do one project between now and Christmas and another between Christmas and June. We would like everyone to work on the Pioneers Challenge between now and Christmas, after Christmas you can work on anything you want maybe Coolest Projects, Scifest or even PiWars.
We watched an excellent Video by @estefanniegg who takes a similar approach to project building as we do.
We then had a brainstorming session for the Pioneers Challenge and as you can see we had some great ideas.
We have narrowed down our ideas to a few projects and the mentors are busy trying to source materials for next week.
We will enter some of our projects next week and we might have a look at 3D printing software.
See you then,
Declan, Dave and Alaidh
By the way don’t forget to check out our Twitter account @CDA_Bodgers
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.
CoderDojo Athenry 