A Sincere Thank You

Today was the last taught session of the Creative Computing Club pilot scheme we will meet again in two weeks for the exhibition. I just want to say this before the blog goes live to the general public, and that is thank you. Thank you O'Reilly, Rapid Electronics, YoYo Games, Love Electronics and Young Rewired State. Thank you to all of these wonderful people who helped fund the project, and thank you to Peoplefund.it and your excellent service. Thank you to all the Twitterers who tweeted their support. Thank you to Theo Clarke all the library staff at Chantry Library and to Anna Shaw and the staff at the Hawthorn's Children Centre. Thank you to all the participants and parents who took part.

We are going live with the blog now, as there was a mix up with the Bank Holiday / Queens Jubilee dates and we want people to know now. Additionally, I will be meeting hundreds of people over the coming weeks (teachers /parents/students/government) and we all agreed it would be best to let them know what we have been up to by sharing what we have done and exactly how we have done it through the resources that can be found here.

Thank you everyone for your time and support.

I hope you enjoy what you see.

Matthew C. Applegate / Pixelh8
@pixelh8 on Twitter

Creative Computing Club: Week 6 Circuit Bending & Sound

It is just the nature of circuit bending that sometimes you can get amazing results and sometimes you do not, and despite a lot of the toys that we brought in weren't very "circuit-bendable" due to their layout, we did some pretty cool stuff.  We still got on and learned things about sound and and how to automate toys through using the Arduino, we got a rather annoying "edutainment" toy to stutter and change pitch. We edited white noise from a circuit bent toy to come up with a bass and snare drum for a simple drum loop using Audacity and Sony Acid

Circuit Bending is very exploratory (that is why there are no resources to download for the session). It was a simple case of opening up the toys and poking different places with the ends of crocodile clips, while recording it all just in case something interesting happens (and sometimes only happens once), we have a good recording of it.

We now have two weeks off to plan our exhibition pieces for July 10th, 2012. It is an open to the public event where we will be discussing what we did and what we hope to do when we return for the full year Creative Computing Club course in September.

From September we will be going a lot more in depth with our projects, spending four weeks on a subject instead of one off sessions. We will be looking at Arduino, Processing, Game Maker, Minecraft EDU, Scratch, LEGO Mindstorms, .net Gadgeteer, HTML/Javascript and App Inventor, Sound, Animation and more, maybe we will see you there?

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.

Bonus: Scratch Introduction

Although we won't be covering Scratch in the 8 week pilot program, I thought I would do a short introduction to it as some of you might find it interesting. I have a made a simple JetPack style game the tutorial, graphics and sound are available from the resources page here and the full game is available from the Scratch website here.

Enjoy!

Creative Computing Club: Week 4 Arduino

Today was all about the Arduino, although it was difficult to get started due to driver installation issues on some of the machines, as soon as we did, the students were able to speed through it.  I was so pleased, as for a lot of them this was the first time a lot of them had ever done any electronics. They were extremely careful and respectful of the components, and followed the instructions perfectly.

I took them through a brief introduction to the parts; the LEDs, the breadboard, the resistors, potentiometers and the layout of the Arduinos it was light introduction, nothing too heavy.

Thankfully their experience with Processing last week helped them speed through the typing of the code and already new about things like the setup() and loop().

We started with the classic "Blink" tutorial and added more lights so we could then sequence them, we also gave the "pinouts" names so we could understand what the code was doing more easily.

We then added a variable "int time" so we could change the timing of the lights a lot easier across the sequence.


We were also able to add a potentiometer to change the speed at which the lights flashed, so we could interact with the Arduino in real time. 

All the resources from the session today can be found here. Sincerest of thanks to loveelectronics.co.uk for the donation of the Arduinos please check out their range of Arduino breakout boards and sensors and thanks to Rapid electronics for donating all of the components.

The Arduino I recommended you purchase is the Arduino Uno from Rapid Electronic and the book I recommended was Getting Started with Arduino which can be found here.

Creative Computing Club: Week 3 Processing

Today was hard work for the students but they coped well, not only did they have to learn Processing but all the terminology and concepts that goes along with computer programming. I admit I threw them in at the deep end, but they all managed to swim. The problems they were having were minor syntax errors; a missing semi-colon, a missing ")" not problems with the big concepts. They were able to take on board variables, arrays and even 2D arrays, it is quite easy when you put it in context of a game. A variable could be the Health Points or HP, an array could be used for the heroes inventory and a maze could be done using a 2D array. We even covered conditionals, functions and for loops.

I didn't want them to understand everything I just wanted to give them an overview of computer programming, these things like all crafts take time. I did however want to have a complete program or in this case a very small simple game, that way they could go home and have the whole program to tinker with. Because we did the Game Maker session first there were a lot of similarities to draw on, like variables and screen layouts.

I think it was a success, the proof of that however will come next week when I find what else they have gone on to do with Processing, like how they came back this week with Game Maker games with loads of cool features. This is just meant to be an introduction, the rest will be up to them. The book I recommended the look at to follow up the session with was "Getting Started with Processing A Quick, Hands-on Introduction"by Casey Reas and Ben Fry here.

Sadly today I was super busy running around making sure people were up to speed so I didn't get a chance to make any photos of the session today, but I promise I will next week when we start to play with the Arduinos.

We made a 2D maze game and so can you by downloading all the resources from the resource page here.

Game Maker Games Screenshots

It seems that a lot of the students have carried on with their games so I am going to post some of the images here. This one is from "Red and the Missing Keys". This game has portals!

If you have carried on with your game and have a screenshot you would like to share, please do.

Update:  May 30th, 2012
More screenshots are now coming in the games are still be developed and are looking great.

Another spectacular looking game really good use of depth. Excellent  work.

Update: July 10th, 2012
Brilliant and difficult game shown off at the exhibition.

 Lovely retro graphics on this one.

 Some really nice touches in this platform game
like quicksand.

 Wonderful open feel to this huge widescreen game.

 Wacky and wonderful concept to this game.