Scratch Beginners – Week 1- Writing Commands to move sprites

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Hello everyone,

We had a great crowd for our first session today in Scratch beginners. A big welcome to all our new Ninja’s and of course a special welcome back to our younger Ninja’s from last year, who are still with us.I forgot to take some pictures of the big crowd but we had up on 100 Ninja’s signed in to our Scratch Beginners session alone today.

Thank you all for coming and for your patience while we got everyone sorted out with downloading Scratch 2.

We started today with our first game, as well as learning how to write commands to move our sprites, we took a brief look at the interface for Scratch 2.

sprites

We also took a first look at some fundamental concepts that we will be using throughout the year. Today we looked at the X and Y axis as well as the number of degrees in a circle.

axixdegrees

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are the presentation slides from the day, in PDF format: CDA-S5-Week_01-FirstGame.pdf

I hope you all enjoyed today and hope to see you all again over the next couple of weeks!

 

Martha

CoderDojo Athenry Plans for 2015-16 Season

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1-CoderDojoAthenry-InfoSession-2015-Sept

CoderDojo Athenry is running every Saturday from 12:00 to 2pm in Gairmscoil Mhuire school (“The Tech”), with regular sessions starting on 26 Sept 2015. New members are always welcome – just come along and fill out a registration form.

2015-16, CoderDojo Athenry is continuing some of our existing streams and adding some new ones. Here is the full lineup of topics that will be featured this year, with links to presentations where available:

For those not starting Scratch Beginners or Advanced, we will have taster sessions of the other topics each week for the first 4 weeks.

Summer Project- Athenry Castle in Minecraft

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2015-08-30_16.17.51

A lot of you had a chance to see the Minecraft Project that some of our Ninjas worked on over the Summer weeks in Athenry Castle a couple of weeks ago.

As part of heritage week, Ruaidhrí, Eiblinn, Eoin, Darragh and Luke built a 13th century replica of Athenry Castle in Minecraft.

Athenry Castle Minecrafters

I promised a link to download the World and the Mods used, so here is a link to Dropbox where you will find all the files.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tfz50etxnwkzg1w/AACPCpWDNmazTJAK7yoM_uwYa?dl=0

See you all Saturday! (September 19th)

Martha

CoderDojo Athenry is Returning on 19 Sept 2015!

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CoderDojo Returning

CoderDojo Athenry is starting back with an information session on 19 September 2015 in Gairmscoil Mhuire VEC school (“the Tech”) at 12:00 noon. All new and existing members are welcome to come along to find out what we have planned for this season.

CoderDojo Athenry is part of CoderDojo (www.coderdojo.com), a global volunteer-led community of free programming clubs for young people.

It is run on an entirely voluntary basis, and you never have to pay to participate. It is open to young people aged 7 to 17, and those aged 12 and under must be accompanied by a parent/guardian.

Regular weekly sessions will start the following week, 26 September 2015, 12-2pm in the same venue.

See you there!

CoderDojo Athenry at Coolest Projects 2015

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Congratulations to everybody from CoderDojo Athenry who participated in the CoderDojo Coolest Projects event on 13 June 2015. It was a very impressive event, held in the RDS Dublin, with over 500 projects from CoderDojo ninjas from Ireland and worldwide.

Here are photos of the participants from CoderDojo Athenry.

Games Category:

James from the Minecraft Modders group with his technically impressive XyZ Mod with World Gen and Gauntlets:

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Eoin from the Minecraft Modders group who entered the detailed and very well structured Global Cuisine mod:

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Ruaidhrí and Luke from the Minecraft Modders group who entered the Weapons, Armour and Money mod:

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Hardware Category:

Michael and Mikey from the CoderDojo Athenry PiDojo who entered their clever and topical Shower Evaluator project that times your shower and displays the amount of water used, cost of water, and cost of energy:

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Alaidh from the PiDojo group who entered the very innovative Sensor Guide for the visually impaired, which was impressively backed up with scientific evaluation:

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Scratch Over 10s:

Emily and Chloe from the Scratch Advanced group had a Scratch program with great environmental potential, Cúisneor, that helps to reduce food waste:

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Scratch Under 10s:

Rachel from the Scratch Beginners/Intermediate Group was our youngest entrant from CoderDojo Athenry, aged 8, and had a fantastic Scratch app for helping young children to learn the letters of the alphabet:

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Well done to everybody who entered!

We should also mention that three projects won prizes:

  • Ruaidhrí and Luke won a prize for best use of Microsoft technologies (Microsoft owns Minecraft, of course)
  • Alaidh won a prize for being a finalist in the Hardware category
  • Mikey and Michael also won a prize for being a finalist in the Hardware category.

PiDojo : Ultrasonic Range Sensor with the Raspberry Pi

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The HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Module Distance Sensor is a cheap sensor that can be used to measure the distance between itself and an object in front of it by sending an ultrasonic pulse and listening for its echo. It can be connected to many things including the Raspberry Pi.

The HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor

The HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor

We connected up our sensor and used the following code to take a measurement.

 

</pre>
#!/usr/bin/python3

import time
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

GPIO_TRIGGER = 10
GPIO_ECHO = 9

print ("Ultrasonic Measurement")

GPIO.setup(GPIO_TRIGGER,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(GPIO_ECHO,GPIO.IN)

GPIO.output(GPIO_TRIGGER,False)

time.sleep(0.5)

GPIO.output(GPIO_TRIGGER,True)
time.sleep(0.001)
GPIO.output(GPIO_TRIGGER,False)
start = time.time()
while GPIO.input(GPIO_ECHO)==0:
 start = time.time()

while GPIO.input(GPIO_ECHO)==1:
 stop = time.time()

elapsed = stop - start

distance = elapsed * 34000

distance = distance / 2

print ('distance = ', distance)

GPIO.cleanup()

 

We then combined our sensor with our 7-Segment displays from last week.
Here are my slides ultrasonic measurement

ModderDojo Countries Mod: How to Upload Files to GitHub

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Thanks to Ninja James for these excellent and detailed instructions, and for setting up a GitHub repository for us to share our code when working on the Countries Mod.

How to stage files to a repository.

WARNING: Please upload your mod in a folder with your topic.

Step 1. Create a folder with the name of the topic your doing for the country mod.

Step 2. Install git = www.git-scm.com, keep pressing next as we will not need any changes to the installation.

Step 3. For example I have my folder on my desktop, so I right click my desktop and click “GIT GUI”. A box should pop up.

Step 4. Click “Clone existing repository”, The source location is the git repo its self, so in the box put this : https://github.com/FrictionlessPortals/Local-Repository.git

Now the Target directory is your folder, click browse and find your folder, for example mine would be on the desktop, its called biomes, select your folder.

Example : My target dir is C:/Users/coderdojo/Desktop/Test Git/Biomes.

Click Clone, This may take a couple of minutes depending on your internet speed.git

Step 5. A window should pop up, looks like this ——->

 

For this example im going to put 2 files in my CLONED FOLDER!. WARNING: Put your your forge files in a folder with your name. Then once your have done that click [RESCAN], your forge files should pop up. Then click [STAGE CHANGED] and click [YES], all your files should move into the [GREEN AREA]. In the box that says [COMMIT MESSAGE], put a message that is related to your Topic in the mod.

Step 6. Click [COMMIT] after you have written your message.

Your files in the [GREEN AREA] should not be there.

Step 7. Now click [PUSH], a box should pop up click push again!

It should ask for my details… Username = FrictionlessPortals

My Password, you will have to ask me through skype, Due to security reasons.

If it says [SUCESS] you’ve sucessfully put your files on github!

If you want more help add me on skype as hypixel.jamertheredstonegamer.

Plotter Demo: Controlled by Arduino, with 3D Printed Parts, Programmed with Scratch

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plotterThanks a million to dojo dad Sean Shanley for a very interesting demo at CoderDojo Athenry on 18 April!

Sean has built a 2D plotter that is controlled by Arduino, with 3D printed parts, and programmed with a Scratch variant called MBlock.

Anyone interested in learning about programming with MBlock can find information on the Instructibles website: How to use graphical programming software to program Arduino and robots?

Also, some parents asked about where they can get an Arduino board. You can buy Arduino Uno and decent kit from Amazon for £24. It has loads of bits …

Sunfounder Project Super Starter Kit with Tutorial Book for Arduino UNO R3 Mega2560 Mega328 Nano

Here is a video of Sean’s plotter in action:

PiDojo : 7-Segment Displays on the Raspberry Pi

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This weekend we continued to explore the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. We had a look at a Data Sheet for a 7-segment display then we went through the code needed to write the number 8 on one and then the Ninjas had a go at writing their own messages on it.

Our 7-Segment display wired up and ready to go.

Our 7-Segment display wired up and ready to go.

Afterwards we tested some code for sending data to two 7-Segment displays by flashing each LED on and off for a fraction of a second and we also had a look at the time.strftime() method which is useful when we need the “time of day” in our code.Next week we will do a little more work with clocks and we will start putting together a measuring device which uses the HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Sensor.

These are my slides from today Raspberry Pi 7-segment display