The children have seen the ‘junk’ they can use to make an instrument and now they’re brainstorming what the instrument could look like and how they can control the sound it makes.
The brainstorming begins
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We’re here!
Some children from year 6 are at the University of Manchester today to participate in the Robot Orchestra project as part of Manchester’s year as European City of Science.
We’re currently hearing about the plans from Professor Danielle George, Siemens, the Halle Orchestra and Noisy Toys. They’re very big plans and we’re very excited!!
HTML & CSS
Today we started looking at HTML & CSS. We’ve spent the last few weeks designing our own Scratch worlds so this is something completely different!
Our first task was to understand HTML tags and get used to modifying basic text & colours. After we’d mastered that we moved on to creating a birthday card for someone in our families.
Here is Elena’s excellent birthday card for her mum in full. Elena’s card
Raspberry Pi
Today we set up our Raspberry Pi computer, it will be a permanent feature of our Code Club going forward and hopefully will be used inside the school curriculum too. A Raspberry Pi is a computer you can buy for only £25 and it is the best selling UK computer ever! Apart from the amazing price, a Raspberry Pi lets you do lots of cool programming including coding of external devices which is something we’ll be getting to grips with in the next few weeks.
Ours is a Raspberry Pi 2 and looks something like this:
To set it up we put our micro SD card in the slot and connected it to power via the micro USB. We used a HDMI lead to connect it to a monitor and added a wireless USB adapter to detect our keyboard and mouse. After that we were good to go.
Today was all about sampling some of the things we’ll be doing over the next few weeks. To start with we used Scratch (as it’s something we’re familiar with) but this time we did things a little bit differently by creating a circuit using the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. We needed a breadboard, two wires, an LED and a resistor, with that lot set up we were able to code Scratch to make an LED blink.
By this point a whisper was going round amongst the children, “it has minecraft”, and indeed it does so we launched Minecraft Pi and wrote a quick program in Python which continuously placed a block of our choice under our feet as we walked, below is Daisy’s glowstone path.
During all this Raspberry Pi activity the children also managed to each make a Scratch times table quiz – we can’t believe they packed so much into just one hour!
Next week we’ll continue our Raspberry Pi journey with a pair of children carrying out some challenges, we’ll also run our usual Scratch activities at the same time so that in the next few months everyone gets to have a go on the Raspberry Pi & we’ll have some amazing Scratch projects too.
Little Bits electronics
We had a treat today in Code Club as we were able to play with some Little Bits we had borrowed from Hive Manchester.
We’ve had some noisy Code Club sessions before but nothing prepared us for this! The children were all so excited, the most frequently used word was “awesome”!
Ben, Josh, Raees & Kayla used the Little Bits synth kit to make musical output. They connected a keyboard and speaker then experimented with adding pulse controls and pressure sensors. The bottom photo shows a dimmer switch which controls a motor speed and buzzer volume then displays the output value on a screen.
Over on the other tables Dominic, Daisy, Darcey, Bobby, Nicholas and Michaela got to grips with the large Little Bits kit. They looked at using push buttons to control LED’s, buzzers and fans (it was really hot in the classroom!). Bobby & Darcey realised you could control the colour of some RGB LEDs using a plastic screwdriver and experimented with different levels of each main colour to see which other colours they could produce. Just before the end of the session Daisy finished her masterpiece – it was definitely the longest chain of the day – with lots of dimmer switches and value displays so she could see & control the level of noise being passed to each one.
Here are a couple of our designs in action.
Rates – controlling movement and sound via a dimmer switch.
Dominic – sword fighting motors, these would be great with Lego Star Wars figures on top!
More micro:bits
We had a play with our micro:bits again this week. This time we decided to experiment with the code and see what we could come up with.
This is the visual code for an interactive badge that responds to button presses.
If we were to write this code as text it would look like this. The 1’s and 0’s tell the micro:bit which LEDs to turn on(1) or off(0).
The micro:bit makes it really easy for us to make other things too. Darcey found out that this code would create a happy dice.
The text code to write a dice program is really simple.
The output is a fully working LED dice, so we can easily use our micro:bits as a replacement next time we can’t find the snakes & ladders dice at home!
Interactive badges
We began our Micro:bit journey by creating some interactive badges to wear. The children coded the micro:bits to show a different image:
- on start up
- when button A was pressed
- when button B was pressed
Below are a few examples of Darcey’s ‘D’ , Bobby’s googley eyes, Daisy’s happy face and love heart.
The micro:bits program runs either when connected to a computer or via a battery pack so we can take our badges with us wherever we go … except to the swimming pool!
The end and new beginnings
In our final session before half term everyone worked to complete and enhance their favourite games so far. We saw lots of very different games produced and some great teamwork from people who finished first.
We’ve produced lots of animations and games over the last few weeks but it was lovely to have an end of term showcase where everyone submitted their favourite finished project. You can see some of the games in our Scratch studio https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/1883020/projects
So, what’s next? We’re moving on from Scratch for a while as we’re excited to welcome a group of very cute looking BBC Micro:bits. (no fighting over the green one!)
The BBC Micro:bits are awesome little devices which will enable us to make a broad range of projects. We’ll start with the Code Club projects using the Code Kingdoms editor and see where it takes us, these little guys have not been widely dispatched yet so we’re definitely guinea pigs but I’m sure everyone will enjoy the challenge. You can find out more about the BBC Micro:bit here https://www.microbit.co.uk and bonus points for anyone who can find out about the BBC Micro (clue : it was big in the 1980s!)
Flappy Parrot
Yesterday we started a new project called ‘Flappy Parrot’. It’s a game based on the once popular Flappy Bird app and we wanted to see if we could recreate it. It’s going to take us another week before we have fully finished games but here is a screenshot to give you a peek preview.
The Clarendon Road Code Club kids are a creative bunch so expect to see Flappy Octopus and Flappy Unicorn on next week’s blog!
Spotlight on….
This week I thought we’d feature one of the games we’re working on at Code Club. The game is the creation of Ben, Raees & Josh who worked really last week to design and draw the characters then this week added the code to make the game playable.
Your character starts in the bottom left and is controlled using the arrow keys.
The aim is to get to the other side without touching black. This tricky small gap requires lots of manoeuvring to get through.
Once at the spinning gate you need to time your next steps carefully to get past in one piece.
Once you reach the end you get a congratulatory message.
If you happen to touch something black then a message pops up to tell you you’re going to be taken back to the start to try again.
The costume even changes to this bigger, angry, red version but don’t worry it soon calms down.
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