Redesigning our fun Although I wrote about the Python side of today’s session at Code Club, it’s worth talking about everything else. Since we’d had the couple of weeks off, we took this opportunity to take a breath and look at how we could get everyone excited again, and improve a few components.
A few observations from previous Code Club sessions this year:
It worked better when we used our round tables for Python, rather than last year’s outward facing seating We ultimately wanted people to offer enough activities that kids could choose - People seemed more focussed when we had defined areas in our open plan set up for each activity People seemed more comfortable when they could see what others were doing, and not feel tethered to only one What we did today Today was set up like this:
Game creation platforms we’re currently using at our Code Club We’ve seen a few great games coming out of Code Club. So far we’ve been using Scratch but we also have a class set of Stencyl licences. Stencyl isn’t covered by Code Club, but there’s some lessons to get started here.
Differences between Scratch and Stencyl Scratch has a simple interface, making it quite a lot easier to get started with for those who haven’t programmed before.
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.
