Background Following on from our Scratch Robot Workshop we’ve been running a second workshop that allows our students to apply some of the Python skills gained from previous Code Club World projects. This workshop lets students connect to the GoPiGo robot to read and understand example scripts, and also see how abstraction is used to simply programming using functions. The information gathered by learning to reverse-engineer existing scripts is used to creat their own script, using sensors to gather information from the robot’s environment and allow it to perform various tasks.

After the initial excitement of ‘hey I’m actually coding!’ and creating some working code, the next step is often to put together the code in different ways and test our understanding. The faster you progress, the sooner this time will come. In other words, having your code not work is a great sign that you’re putting in the effort to progress. This also applies if you’re a teacher or volunteer who may be starting to put things together yourself, while helping kids learn.

This term we had some great fun with Python. Raspberry Pi Robots with Python One of the major changes was the introduction of a second robot workshop, using the GoPiGo by Dexter Industries. One of the key differences in this robot, from our BrickPi robot, is that it doesn’t use Lego Mindstorm parts. It is equipped with a camera and ultrasonic (distance) sensor, which can be rotated together in an arc, using a small servo motor.