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.
This post follows on from a previous post about keeping coding interesting with multiple skill levels. In this post, I’ll be expanding on the idea by talking about putting together new activities to run at your Code Club or insert-you-coding-maker-startup-equivalent-here.
Types of activities Although not every activity needs to be step-by-step, the expectations need to be clear. In the example of designing a game, the pre-requisites must be clear so that it’s possible to complete the activity comfortably, with enough challenges to keep it interesting.
Guided learning verses multiple stream choices In our own Code Club, we’ve taken a few different approaches:
picking out individual interesting projects from the Code Club curriculum each week; following the curriculum in order; providing a variety of activities that provide students with skills ranging from various forms of visual coding to 3d design for 3d printing; and providing short-term workshops that apply coding skills, in areas such as robotics and web applications.
