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

Advancers: Scratch Platform Engine – Week 1

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This week was quite busy in the Advancers group.

Talk on Coolest Projects

  • Oliver gave a talk on the “Coolest projects” and many of us are planning on targetting it this year –
    • the deadlines are Mid-March for submission of ideas and Mid-June to attend the event itself!
    • Mark and Oliver are going to dedicate the last 30 min of each week to helping people with their projects.

Platform Engine

We started a platform Engine and got most of the code done – next week we’ll finish up the engine (not much code, honest!) and see what it would take to make it into games.  A Platform Engine is something that’s useful in lots of types of games or interactive adventures – be they mario-style or escape-room style, etc.  Once we have this platform engine done, we can easily apply it to other cases.  Think about ideas for platformers for your coolest project!

platform_week1

Things we got working:

  1. Gravity so the player falls
  2. Stopping when we hit the ground
  3. Not falling “into” the ground
  4. Walking along bumpy ground
  5. Not walking over bumps that are too high (like walls)
  6. Jumping

Things we didn’t get working (yet):

  1. “popping” up over walls
  2. Animating our walk
  3. Snagging on edges
  4. Scores, lives, etc.

Next week we can look at the above to see how we might do it, and also what it might take to make it look pretty, add a loading screen, etc.

The full code for today is below (click to view large):

Code from Week 1

Code from Week 1

We will finish this next week and make a game out of it!  You can download the project from here

Bodgers – Reaction Game

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reaction_bb.pngHi Everybody

This week we finished coding our Reaction Game. We then had Reaction Game tournament congratulations to Darragh our winner. I have a few slides from today which are available here reaction and you can also check out our code on Dropbox here.

For the next few weeks we will be building an Attendance/Clock In machine using our Laptops. You will need a version of Python 3, if you don’t have it installed you can download it from here.

See you all next week.

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/

2016 Christmas Party and Show & Tell at CoderDojo Athenry

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Here are photos from our Christmas party and Show & Tell day at CoderDojo Athenry on 10 December 2016.

It was really impressive to see the things that our young people had built and created. There was also a great Robot Duels session, organised by mentor Declan in the Bodgers group: Bodgers – Robot Duels At CoderDojo Athenry

We are very grateful to our supporters in the community around Athenry:

  • Clarin College and Principal Ciaran Folan, who are so generous with their space every week
  • Galway & Roscommon Education & Training Board, who provide us with an annual Youth Club Grant
  • Medtronic and Declan Fox, who have provided us with a grant linked to Declan’s volunteering
  • Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Mark Davis, who provide us with loaner laptops
  • Boston Scientific and Kevin Madden, who provided us with the loan of three 3D printers for the semester
  • Supermacs and Joyces, both of whom gave us generous deals on the food for the Christmas party

And of course we are eternally grateful to our wonderful mentors, and to the parents who come along with their children every week. Thank you!

We look forward to seeing you all in the New Year!

slide10

Bodgers – Robot Duels At CoderDojo Athenry

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Hi Everyone

As part of the show and tell session the Bodgers group held a Robot Wars Style event. We used the two wheeled robots from last year controlled by Nintendo Wii Remotes.

If you want to build your own two wheeled robot you can check out my notes from last year here.

To control the robots using the Wiimote I followed Matt Hawkins Wiimote tutorial from here (If you have a Raspberry Pi 3 you can skip step 2 as Bluetooth is already working. Don’t forget step 3  install Python Cwiid). I then added the code to control the robot using GPIO Zero, you can get my code wii_robot.py here.

Happy Christmas everybody.

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!

Bodgers –Getting Started with Your Own Raspberry Pi or Arduino

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Hi Everybody

This Saturday the Bodgers group looked at some of the tools available to set up and use the Raspberry Pi or Arduino at home. We looked software for formatting SD Cards, some of the SD card images available for the Raspberry Pi, putting images on SD cards, configuring the Raspberry Pi and connecting to the Raspberry Pi.

We also did a quick overview of the Arduino IDE. This software allows us to write and upload software to the Arduino.

You can find the links to the software we used short tutorials on how to use them in my slides from Saturday here pi-and-arduino-tools.

We also took a look at the MagPi Magazine which is the official Raspberry Pi magazine. there are a load of interesting articles in the Christmas issue which is in the shops now or is available for download for free from https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi-issues/MagPi52.pdf . There are a few nice articles on basic stuff like breadboards and GPIO Zero and there are also some articles on robot sensors which anybody who wants to continue from where we left off with robots will find very interesting.

There is also news of a new programme from the Raspberry Pi Foundation which is aimed at kids that are around the same age as the Bodgers group. The Pioneers is a series of challenges that will roughly last the length of the school term and will be open-ended to allow you to come up with your own ideas. Unfortunately the competition is limited to the UK for now but it will be open to the rest of the world soon. Check out The MagPi for more information.

The MagPi needed to show some examples of what kids can make for the Pioneers article so obviously they looked to CoderDojo Athenry for inspiration :).    capture

CoderDojo Athenry at Minevention

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Minevention2016.JPG

Well done to everybody at CoderDojo Athenry who participated in Minevention 2016 in the Radisson Hotel Galway on 26 and 27 November.

Our stand looked great, with the Pi-based games console, a TV showing the Athenry Castle Minecraft model, the Oculus Rift demoing a Unity game, one of the Bodger’s robots, members with their laptops demoing Scratch programs and Minecraft modding, and a 3D printer on the first day.

We were very proud of our ninjas who are fantastic ambassadors for CoderDojo! Thank you for all of your great work!

In addition, thanks very much to Lisa O’Brien and the Minevention team for allowing us to participate, and for inviting me to give a presentation about CoderDojo.