WordPress.com prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
This gallery contains 13 photos.
Thanks to everybody who attended our show-and-tell session and Christmas party on 14 December! It was great to see ninjas of all ages getting up and demonstrating their great projects to over 120 people! We will return on 18 January … Continue reading
Christmas is coming and CoderDojo Athenry is coming to an end for 2013, with our final session of the year on Saturday 14 December from 12:00. We will of course resume in January – keep an eye on the mailing list for exact dates.
Even if you missed one or two recent sessions, please do join us for our last session of the year, which will be a very special one: our ninjas from each of the different groups will demonstrate what they have been working on and then we will have a party with pizza and drinks!
For the first part of the session, each of the groups will have about 15 minutes during which ninjas from the group will demonstrate what they have been working on, in this order:
And don’t worry: we won’t put any ninja on the spot – nobody has to speak unless they would like to.
After the demos, we will all have a party!
Some parents have contacted us to offer to bring something for the party – thank you for your very kind offers, but Ciaran Folan and Gairmscoil Mhuire school are arranging the food, for which we are very grateful. Thank you, Ciaran, and of course huge thanks to you and the school for so generously hosting CoderDojo Athenry every week.
By the way, in case you are wondering about when we will be awarding belts this season, we will do that at the last session before Easter.
Hello everyone,
Today we took a look at Paint.net, which is a drawing program. I quickly went through the menus but the best way to learn a program like this is to use it and experiment with it.
The main reason we looked at it this week was because we will need it next week as we begin our modelling and stop/motion animation. After we take our photos we will be able to “clean them up before we bring them into Scratch as our Sprites.
Next week, if the Moms and Dads could bring along a camera or phone along with the lead to attach these to your laptop.
And of course most important of all bring your imagination!
Here the full notes from todays session in PDF form. CDA-S3-Challenge07-LearnAboutPainting.pdf
In recent weeks, we have been writing JavaScript functions to build MineCraft structures using ScriptCraftJS.
Download our mods here: https://cdathenry.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/modderdojo-athenry-our-scriptcraftjs-minecraft-mods/
This week, we spent a bit more time learning about functions, since they are an extremely important part of any programming language. Slides below.
Today we continued looking at some more new topics in Al Sweigart’s Hangman game http://inventwithpython.com/chapter9.html. Next week we will be looking at the game itself. The source code from today’s code snippets are here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nlqaivbro7r5m9a/iRYEIa6Cti. Here are today’s slides.python session7
Hello Everyone,
Great to see you all yesterday and welcome to our new members.
Yesterday, we made a slight departure from the games we have done in previous weeks. This weeks game was a mathematical Guessing Game.
We only had one sprite and one large block of code. We had to create variables and figure out all the possible situations that could occur when a guess was made.
Again this week, I am looking for you to add your own signature to your game by continuing to add some complexity. Yesterday I saw people add costumes so every time he guessed wrong, a sad face appears. There was also a lot of sound being added! You don’t have to keep all the code either, how about replacing the Repeat 5 times with a 60 seconds timer instead.
I would like you all to keep working on the game and those of you who like me to show your game to the rest of the room, like I did with Alex’s brilliant soccer game, please upload it to the Scratch website. I will show them before the session starts next week.
Next week as I said we will be doing Paint.net, please download in advance if you can. See you all there.
Here are the notes in PDF form from our Week 6 Session. CDA-S3-Challenge06GuessNumbers.pdf
We are now sharing our ScriptCraftJS mods here: https://cdathenry.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/modderdojo-athenry-our-scriptcraftjs-minecraft-mods/
We will keep updating that post as members of the group finish new mods. Anybody anywhere can download our mods: when they click on the mod’s picture, they will get a link to download it from Dropbox.
Here are some guidelines for posting your mods:
Today the Python group began looking at the Hangman Game from Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python (http://inventwithpython.com/chapter9.html). There are many new concepts in this game so we are going to spend the next few weeks looking at these.
We looked at Lists which are a way of storing a number of values in one variable. We had some fun writing code snippets mainly based around X-Factor. They are available here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ax43g3recnn02p6/Cat_QexogU
We looked at some new ways of working with strings such as multi-line strings. We also learned about new types of functions called methods.
Next week we will be looking at a new type of loop called a for loop.
Here are my slides from today. python session6
This week we began the task of cracking the following codeed message.
XUFHJ YMJ KNSFQ KWTSYNJW. YMJXJ FWJ YMJ ATDFLJX TK YMJ XYFWXMNU JSYJWUWNXJ. NYX HTSYNSZNSL RNXXNTS YT JCUQTWJ XYWFSLJ SJB BTWQIX, YT XJJP TZY SJB QNKJ FSI SJB HNANQNEFYNTSX, YT GTQIQD LT BMJWJ ST TSJ MFX LTSJ GJKTWJ.
All we know is this message is written in English. To crack this code we will use some common features of the English language.
The following link was the hand out provided to everyone. Each person used this handout to work through each stage of the decryption.
Can you decrypt this message (pupils notes)
The teachers handouts is available at the following link. This handout provides detailed steps of how to work through decrypting the message.
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.
You will a full version of the my notes in pdf form here. CDA-S4-Challenge09-Scrolling.pdf
Have a great Easter!
Martha
CoderDojo Athenry 