Creative Commons License

All Creative Computer Club Resources created by Matthew C. Applegate are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please note that some of these resources also contain images of software that is protected by copyright and are used under special agreement with these software companies, they are therefore are not covered by the Creative Commons License. The text is free to download, use, edit and redistribute, the images are free to download and use as is, unfortunately they are not available to edit and redistribute. You can find the resources page here.←

Tuesday, 12 June 2012

Creative Computing Club: Week 5 LEGO Mindstorms

Really impressed by the students today during the LEGO® Mindstorms® session, they took to it really quickly and were really confident in doing so. I had planned to teach them three examples, but only ended up teaching them two, I let them explore the Mindstorms kit and then provided them with a challenge to work out on their own, both teams successfully solved the challenge and had fun doing so. We got the kit to walk, detect colours, distance, play sounds and a combination of these.

You can download all the resources from this and the other sessions from here, you'll need the standard LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit for the examples using the "Alpha Rex" robot.

We also had quite a bit of good news this week, one student has been accepted on to a Degree and one has been nominated for Best Young Scientist award, so well done to both of them, very proud of of them.

Finally we talked about what we hoped to achieve in the year long program starting in September, hopefully adding .net Gadgeteer, Minecraft EDU, HTML/Javascript and App Inventor to the existing Processing, Game Maker, Arduino, LEGO Mindstorms, animation and sound modules.

I am going to set up Creative Computing Club as a Community Interest Company and that way we can get more funding to get more equipment and to do bigger projects in the year long curriculum.

Today was excellent, so I want to do more of the same.

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Donations and Creative Computing Club Sponsors

Please Donate

Please consider donating to help fund this project, even small amounts go a long way to help change these kids lives and their understanding of technology.

Company Sponsors

I am truly pleased to announce that YoYo Games have sponsored the club by providing copies of their amazing Game Maker and Game Maker HTML5 software. Having access to this excellent software not only means we can make great games but share them with the world. Thank you so much to all the staff at YoYo Games for making this possible.

We are also very pleased to announce that O'Reilly have offered assistance by way of some of their instructional books you can check out their full catalog of books here. O'Reilly have a great reputation with things like the Maker Faire (they also run a Maker Faire in the UK too) so we are truly grateful for their help and support through their excellent resources.

It is a huge honor to have the support of Young Rewired State not only do they run amazing events to encourage young people to code and hack data for good, they were in part inspiration for me to set up this group. The fun and the comradery of the events that I have worked with them at have been of amazing benefit to all those involved. I sincerely thank Young Rewired State not only for helping fund us but also for simply being Young Rewired State.

I am really pleased to announce that Rapid Electronics supplier of electronic components, equipment and educational kits have decided to help out the Creative Computing Club. It is genuinely appreciated to have this local and leading UK distributor supporting us not only with vital components but years of knowledge and experience. Thank you all at Rapid.

Huge thanks to loveelectronics.co.uk for donating some Arduino ADK and Ethernet boards to the Creative Computing Club allowing us to connect our electronics projects to Android phones and the internet. Check out the great range of breakout boards, sensors and wireless products here.

Creative Commons License

All Creative Computer Club Resources by Matthew C. Applegate are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please note that some of these resources also contain images of software that is protected by copyright and are used under special agreement with these software companies, they are therefore are not covered by the Creative Commons License. The text is free to download, use, edit and redistribute, the images are free to download and use as is, unfortunately they are not available to edit and redistribute. You can find the resources page here.