Week 2 – Scratch Beginners – Building on our first game

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Hi everyone,

Great to see so many of you there on Saturday. This weeks starting point was our game from last week. We wanted to add extra functionality. We added code to the Heart so that something happened when the Hippo touched it. Most people added some sound.

hippo

sensing

We also made our first variable. We did this so that we could keep track of our score. Using this score we also could add code to make something happen when you reached a certain score and win the game. Again here we added a sound and switched backgrounds.

variable

We learned and used a lot of new code this week and we will see over the coming weeks how we can incorporate it into many different types of games.

Why don’t you try using all the code we have used so far to create your own game. We will take time at the beginning of next weeks session to look at any games that people want to show us.

yourgame

See you all next week!

Here are the notes from todays session in PDF CDA-S5-Week_02-FirstGame-Part2.pdf

Scratch Advanced: Twister Part 2

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There was a huge group for today’s class where we took the Shape block from last week and built an amazing Twister project out of it.

We learnt:

  • more about angles and Sine and Cos
  • some basics of creating 3D illusions on a computer screen

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Twister Notes Week Two.

We didn’t get it quite finished, but managed to get to some 3D. Follow the notes to get to the end and check out this sample project that has all the pieces from the doc and a few extra features in. It’s addictive playing with the twister!

Download the completed project here!

Scratch Advanced: Twister Part 1

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In Scratch advanced this week we learned some cool math formulas that are really handy for doing interesting stuff in programming.

week1

The things we went through!

  • We revised X and Y and reminded ourselves how it works
  • We drew a house using X and Y
  • We learnt about circles and radius
  • We learnt about the math formulas Sin and Cos and how they can be used to get X and Y positions on a circle
  • We learnt about Custom Blocks in Scratch
  • We wrote our own Custom Block that could draw a shape of any size and number of sides, using Sin and Cos to figure out the points!
  • We used that Custom block to make lots of neat patterns (some by accident!)

The notes are attached in PDF and if you follow them you will have a project ready to go for this Saturday – we are going to take that custom block and do some really cool things with it.    Don’t worry if you don’t have the time to do it or can’t follow the notes though – we’ll have this shared out so you can just take off where we finished!

Twister Notes Week1

Download the Scratch Code here!

Minecraft Modding Taster Session – Week 1

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Slide1

This season at CoderDojo Athenry, the advanced groups are all starting with taster sessions of the various topics we will cover.

In Week 1, the topic we are covering is Minecraft Modding using JavaScript.

Here are the notes:

  1. Getting Started with ScriptCraft and JavaScript
  2. How to Connect to Each Other’s Servers
  3. Creating our First ScriptCraft Mods

Coming up next week: in introduction to Raspberry Pi and Electronics

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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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.