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.
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.
I used to scribble a ton of stuff in the back of one of my old Commodore64 manuals. Whenever I’d find something cool in a magazine or book, or later, text files, I’d scrawl it in. There was something about it being a bit messy that made it easier to remember. These days, there’s a ton of different ways to do that online or in files, but most smart coders I know just go and look up their own code.
