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 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!

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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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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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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.

Creators – Finishing Pin Bowling

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This week, despite a small group, we finished off the Pin Bowling game. After Christmas we’ll move onto a different game – most likely something 1st person in design.

UI Elements – Text and Buttons

We added two UI Text elements to our game and aligned them to the top left and top right hand corners respectively. One is used for showing the current score and one is used for showing the number of shots remaining. Note that when we add UI elements, Unity automatically adds a Canvas and an EventSystem for us.

UI elements don’t have a standard Transform component, instead they have a RectTransform component which is used to describe their position within their Canvas. To align to a particular location we click on the square below the words “Rect Transform” and select how we’d like to align within the Canvas by clicking one of the options while holding the Shift and Alt keys to set both the pivot and position.

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Continue reading →

Bodgers – BackTo Basics

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Hi again everybody.

Over the last couple of Saturdays the bodgers group have been preparing to build our own circuits. Two weeks ago we looked at some of the theory behind electronics, how the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi work, how to use GPIO Zero the main Python module we will use and we watched some videos which explained how some of the components we will be using work together. Last Saturday we built some simple circuits.

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Button

The first circuit shown above uses GPIO pin 17 to light a LED and the second uses GPIO 2 to read from push button switch. Here are my slides from both sessions back-to-basics.

As we have only a short session next week and the Christmas party is the following week we will return to building circuits after the Christmas break.

Next week I will demonstrate some of the tools I use to set up the Raspberry Pi, this will include tools to format and write to SD cards and tools for finding the IP address of your Raspberry Pi. I will also do a very basic overview of the Arduino. So if you have or are hoping to get some hardware to experiment with at home this session shouldn’t be missed.

I will also talk about what looks like a cool new challenge from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

See you all next week.

Week 9, Explorers – Pen Commands

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Hello Everyone,

Thank you all for coming again this week. This week we looked at pen commands, we have not done this before in the Explorers group so it was new for everyone.

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

And lastly we added buttons to our game. We added two separate buttons, a Start and Stop.

Here are the full Pdf version of my notes from this weeks session. cda-s6-challenge-pen-command.pdf

Martha