I thought it’d be interesting for our Code Club kids to see behind-the-scenes, and for other Code Club teachers/volunteers to see our process. Firstly, there’s some really good information provided by Dexter Industries, who make these robots. I’ve pulled this post together from notes made at the time. This post covers the first few steps I went through last year, setting up the GoPiGo robot. Since we have done a bit more Python this year, the aim will be to program this with Python, and our BrickPi robot will be programmed in the older offline version 1.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been able to see a few great Scratch projects that are being build at our Code Club! This year it was great to have everyone sign up to Scratch before our Code Club started again at the start of this year. By doing this, it meant that we were mostly all working online, which gave people the opportunity to keep working on things at home, rather than waiting for the next Code Club.

Looking through various Python tutorials that are online for kids, I can kind of see why some of the initial rewards can seem ‘boring’ to kids who are being lured by the pretty graphics and animations of modern tablets. Coding challenges and Capture The Flag (CTF) team competitions have always seemed a bit more exciting than talking about text-adventures sometimes. Although we’re probably not up to CTFs or the Google coding challenges that are running, I came across a fun level-based Python challenge, written by Nadav Sanet, that just happens to align quite well with our Code Club activities.