Lately a few of us having been running some workshops with Scratch and the Makey Makey. Once the grade 3 and 4 students had finished the Code Club Scratch 1 and 2 modules, and some additional projects, we moved them onto the Makey Makey workshop. The Makey Makey is a device that allows objects to be connected and used as switches, which the computer interprets as various keys on a keyboard or mouse.

Just Coding vs. Improving and Learning New Things The more years our school’s Code Club runs, the more I realise how well-designed the Code Club Australia curriculum is. I’ve previously mentioned that we started our Code Club just picking out what we thought would be most fun for the kids. Now I’ve realised that it’s probably time to stop apologising for teaching coding, and muster a degree of boldness and work hard to show kids what they can do with it.

This post adds onto the previous tutorial, so if you haven’t already, you shoud go have a look at that first. Adding sound alerts If you’ve got a speaker connected to your Micro:bit, or have the MI:Power battery add-on that includes a speaker, it’s easy to add a sound to alert us of sending or receiving a new emoticon. In the original code, we had an if statement that would display the TARGET image, pause, and then display whatever image the incoming index pointed to: