That’s why Python is often the first text-based language that young people learn to program in. The familiar syntax can lower the barrier to taking the first steps away from a block-based programming environment, such as Scratch.

In 2021, Python ranked in first place in an industry-standard popularity index of a major software quality assessment company, confirming its favoured position in software engineering. Python is, for example, championed by Google and used in many of its applications.

Coding for kids in Python

Python’s popularity means there are many excellent resources for learning this language. These resources often focus on creating programs that produce text outputs. We wanted to do something different.

Our new ‘Introduction to Python’ project path focuses on creating digital visuals using the Python p5 library. This library is like a set of tools that allows you to get creative by using Python code to draw shapes, edit images, and create frame-by-frame animations. That makes it the perfect choice for young learners: they can develop their knowledge and skills in Python programming while creating cool visuals that they’ll be proud of. 

What is in the ‘Introduction to Python’ path?

The ‘Introduction to Python’ project path is a set of written coding instructions, designed according to our Digital Making Framework.

Through the Framework, we encourage learners to become independent coders and digital makers by gently removing scaffolding as they progress along the projects in a path. Paths begin with three Explore projects, in which learners are guided through tasks that introduce them to new coding skills. Next, learners complete two Design projects. Here, they are encouraged to practise their skills and bring in their own interests to personalise their coding creations. Finally, learners complete one Invent project. This is where they put everything that they have learned together and create something unique that matters to them.

The structure of our Digital Making Framework means that learners 美人电影 the structured development process of a coding project and learn how to turn their ideas into reality. The Framework also supports with finding errors in their code (debugging), showing them that errors are a part of computer programming and just temporary setbacks that you can overcome.

What coding skills and knowledge will young people learn?

The Explore projects are where the initial learning takes place. The key programming concepts covered in this path are:

• Variables
• Performing calculations with variables
• Using functions
• Using selection (if, elif and else)
• Using repetition (for loops)
• Using randomisation
• Importing from libraries

Learners also explore aspects of digital visual media concepts:

• Coordinates
• RGB colours
• Screen size
• Layers
• Frames and animation

Learners then develop these skills and knowledge by putting them into practice in the Design and Invent projects, where they add in their own ideas and creativity. 

Explore project 1: Hello world emoji

In the first Explore project of this path, learners create an interactive program that uses emoji characters as the visual element.

This is the first step into Python and gets learners used to the syntax for printing text, using variables, and defining functions.

Explore project 2: Target practice

In this Explore project, learners create an archery game. They are introduced to the p5 library, which they use to draw an archery board and create the arrows.

The new programming concept covered in this project is selection, where learners use if, elif and else to allocate points for the game.

Explore project 3: Rocket launch

The final Explore project gets learners to animate a rocket launching into space. They create an interactive animation where the user is asked to enter an amount of fuel for the rocket launch. The animation then shows if the fuel is enough to get the rocket into orbit.

The new programming concept covered here is repetition. Learners use for loops to animate smoke coming from the exhaust of the rocket.

Design project 1: Make a face

The first Design project allows learners to unleash their creativity by drawing a face using the Python coding skills that they have built in the Explore projects. They have full control of the design for their face and can explore three examples for inspiration.

Learners are also encouraged to share their drawings in the community library, where there are lots of fun projects to discover already. In this project, learners apply all of the coding skills and knowledge covered in the Explore projects, including selection, repetition, and variables.

Design project 2: Don’t collide!

In the second Design project, learners code a scrolling game called ‘Don’t collide’, where a character or vehicle moves down the screen while having to avoid obstacles.

Learners can choose their own theme for the game, and decide what will move down the screen and what the obstacles will look like. In this project, they also get to practice everything they learned in the Explore projects. 

Invent project: Powerful patterns

This project is the ultimate chance for learners to put all of their skills and knowledge into practice and get creative. They design their own unique patterns and create frame-by-frame animations.

The Invent project offers ingredients, which are short reminders of all the key skills that learners have gained while completing the previous projects in the path. The ingredients encourage them to be independent whilst also supporting them with code snippets to help them along.

Key questions answered

Who is the ‘Introduction to Python’ path for?

We have written the projects in the path with young people around the age of 9 to 13 in mind. To code in a text-based language, a young person needs to be familiar with using a keyboard, due to the typing involved. A learner may have completed one of our Scratch paths prior to this one, but this isn’t essential. and we encourage beginner coders to take this path first if that is their choice.

What software do learners need to code these projects?

A web browser. In every project, starter code is provided in a free web-based development environment called Trinket, where learners add their own code. The starter Trinkets include everything that learners need to use Python and access the p5 library.

If preferred, the projects also include instructions for using a desktop-based programming environment, such as Thonny.

How long will the path take to complete?

We’ve designed the path to be completed in around six one-hour sessions, with one hour per project. However, the project instructions encourage learners to upgrade their projects and go further if they wish. This means that young people might want to spend a little more time getting their projects exactly as they imagine them.

Can a young person save their progress through the path?

Yes, if you or your young person sign up for an account, progress will be saved. The account will also show what other projects on our website the young person has completed.

What can young people do next after completing this path?

Taking part in Coolest Projects Global

At the end of the path, learners are encouraged to register a project they’re making with their new coding skills for Coolest Projects Global, our world-leading online technology showcase for young people.

Taking part is free, all online, and beginners as well as more 美人电影d young tech creators are welcome and invited. This is their unique opportunity to share their ingenuity in an online gallery for the world and the Coolest Projects community to celebrate.

Coding more Python projects with us

The ideal next place to go for young people who want to do more coding is our ‘More Python’ path. In this path, kids move beyond the basics they learned in ‘Introduction to Python’. They learn how to use lists, dictionaries, and files to create charts, models, and artwork. And keep your eye on our blog and social media to find out when we release the ‘Further Python’ path for young coders.

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Digital Making at Home is our initiative to encourage young people to code along with us in their homes across the world. We support them with weekly themed content, code-along videos, live streams, and more!

For our newest theme, we explore making digital art. Many young makers are no stranger to making art, especially the digital kind! That’s why this week, we’re inviting them to bring their most colourful and imaginative ideas to life using code.

So this week for Digital Making at Home, let’s make some art!

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One of the major perks of being a 抖阴视频 Pi Creative Technologist is the chance to attend weekend workshops, where we get to go to a totally different city and meet with inspiring and knowledgeable individuals who can help us on our journey towards our final exhibition and showing off our digital projects! Last workshop we visited London to spend the weekend over with Joel Lewis at Hellicar & Lewis; a craft, design and technology studio that specialises in engagement. Here, Joel opened our minds to the wonder that is openFrameworks on Pi!

openFrameworks is ‘an open source C++ toolkit for creative coding’. Yes, creative coding, that’s a thing! At first glance oF can seem quite intimidating with countless amounts of libraries, add-ons and documentation attached to it. For us, taking a look through it all, we couldn’t help but get immediately excited about everything that oF had to offer us, from projection mapping and facial recognition to graphic rendering and animation as well as so much more! But without some guidance it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it all.

Luckily for us, Joel Lewis is an openFrameworks wizard and quickly squished any negative or fearful thoughts we may initially have had by showing us some of the inspiring work that he and his team at Hellicar & Lewis had produced using this framework. They have created work for nonprofit organisations such as an interactive arctic dome installation for Greenpeace, and commercial pieces for brands such as Nike with an interactive live broadcast for of Nike’s ‘Festival of Feel’.

However, what impressed me the most was how they had used what the framework had to offer to create pieces of technology to help make people’s lives better, one major piece of work being Somability. This is a series of technology applications that included interaction such as visual amplification and rhythmic interaction; these put together promoted expressive movement and collaboration among people with profound and multiple learning difficulties.

The Making of Somability from Cariad Interactive on Vimeo

Joel also emphasised his love for the open source community during the workshop. Gone are the days where people want to hide their work and keep their findings to themselves so as to become better than their peers; today’s world is all about being open and sharing with the community! Every library and add-on within oF has been created by somebody and shared freely, asking for nothing in return. That might sound crazy but in reality it’s actually very clever! Not only do you help others (such as myself) to learn how to code by looking at examples and tweaking bits that are already there to suit my own needs, you also get the benefits of the community building upon your initial piece of code, fixing bugs or even making it better than you could have done yourself. Heck, somebody might even see your open source code and offer you a job because of it!

An open source community is also a friendly one, one where people actually want to help others instead of simply focusing on their own projects, and therefore the openFrameworks forum is always full of people willing to pass on their knowledge to others and help wherever they can; which is great news for us newbies!

After the weekend at Hellicar & Lewis I’m left feeling very excited about what openFrameworks and the open source community surrounding it has to offer. I can’t wait to start piecing together my own puzzle!

The Creative Technologists are really ramping up production on their final projects and I can’t wait to see what they do with their new openFrameworks skills. Keep an eye on the blog for updates from CTs over the next six months!

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We have a Google+ community for the group to post ideas, share interesting links and ask each other for help and we hoped they would also use it to arrange to meet up outside of the organised field trips: within the first month, one of them found the Art Hackathon and suggested they go along and take part. Three of them went along and teamed up with some others. Yasmin wrote a full account of the hack…

I’ve always heard about how awesome Hackathons could be; they’re a chance to surround yourself with intelligent people who share the same interest, come up with inspiring ideas together and become engrossed in a project, with everyone chipping in to turn concept into reality over one weekend.

But I’m going to be perfectly honest with you here; however awesome this sounds, I can’t help but feel a tad intimidated by it all. There’s still so much I feel I have yet to learn and I always worry about how much of an asset (or a nuisance) I would be.

So when I saw an opportunity to go to an Art Hackathon, which aspired to mix teams with different skill sets and types, I knew that I had to attend, and I’m so glad I did! With the Hackathon holding presentations by many talented people including Joel Lewis, Di Mainstone and Nick Rothwell, as well tables full of various tech and art supplies, there were no limitations to the amount of creativity that we could muster!

Yasmin and Milton

All of this inspired a creation that managed to win 2nd Place for Peoples Choice, and I can proudly say that I was a part of its development:

Emoti – Visualising our Emotions

Emoti shows the emotional state of the world through combined visual colours and audio, resulting in a beautifully chaotic representation of the emotional state of the world – or at least the twitterverse.

Using Twitter Widgets, our team was able to pull certain keywords from tweets being posted in real time and assign them to different emotion types, which meant being able to have constantly updated data on how people were feeling on twitter through these emotion-related keywords. The emotions we assigned them to were: Happy, Sad, Surprised, Afraid and Angry.

From this data we then created a simple HTML web-page with 5 divs, or blocks, of colour relating to the different emotion states. These would constantly change width depending on the data that was being collected from the tweets to give a visual representation of how many people were tweeting under each emotion:

• Green = Happy
• Blue = Sad
• Yellow = Surprised
• Pink = Afraid
• Red = Angry

To make this 美人电影 of witnessing how the world feels and how frequently these emotions change more immersive, these visual representations are also accompanied with audio. We chose five audio tracks, one to depict each emotion, adding them into the web-page using the HTML5 audio tag, and adjusted their volume depending on the emotion-based twitter data with some JavaScript wizardry. This ended up with the clashing music types seemingly battling against each other, reflecting how hectic the live emotion states were and how rapidly they would change at random; one moment showing solely happiness, the next ultimate anger.

The Hackathon Effect

This was an Art Hackathon don’t forget, so, of course we had to present this data in a beautiful and intriguing way. What’s more intriguing than creating the illusion of 3D colour-changing ripples?!

For this effect, the designers in our team laser cut clear plastic to create the individual ripples and slotted them into a black board. I decided this would be the perfect opportunity to whip out my 抖阴视频 Pi! We ran the web-page through the Pi and hooked it up to the HDMIPi, allowing a bright screen for our structure to be placed onto, so that the moving coloured blocks from below would shine onto the clear plastic and give the illusion of a 3D object.

Finally, the structure was put together in a dark, enclosed space, and the end product came to life, completely exceeding my expectations! Colours danced gracefully across the ripples, making us forget that there was even a web-page below. It was easy to get lost in the entrancing movement of pattern that the object seemed to create. As soon as you immerse yourself in the full 美人电影, with audio as well as these entrancing visuals, it becomes a little overwhelming. Watching the colours is one thing, but hearing the clashes of audio really brings the message across that this is how people from around the world are feeling right now.

It’s both a marvel and a mess all at the same time; both beautiful and chaotic. Just like the emotions we feel and the complexity behind them.

Yes, it’s open source! Find the (somewhat messy) code here: https://github.com/itomblack/emotion-twitter

What I Gained…

Aside from the obvious: an awesome project, a better understanding of how to work in a team and improved coding skills, I managed to come away from the Hackathon feeling much more positive about what I, as an individual, can achieve. I may not be have been the most skilled coder in the room but I was still able to have meaningful input on the project, both creatively and through my development skills, which leaves me wondering what I was so worried about in the first place!

As well as this I’m so grateful to have had the pleasure of meeting many creative and genuinely lovely people. It was so interesting to see all of the various projects that everyone had made, each one entirely unique and fascinating in its own right.

Thank you to the people behind the Art Hackathon event and those intelligent folk within the Emoti Dream Team who helped bring it to life:

• Ian Black
• Katherine F Hudson
• Milton De Paula
• Bawar Jalal
• Elizabeth Corbin
• Caroline Y Zheng

P.S. This is my very first blog, how am I doing? Let me know! (If you want to… No pressure…)

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After much preparation we are super happy to announce an exciting new project from the 碟调网在线观看.

The 抖阴视频 Pi Creative Technologists is a mentoring programme for creative people interested in technology aged 16 – 21 years old. If your passion is the creative arts, and you’re wondering how you can use technology to enhance that, this is for you.

Ben and I are heading up the programme, and the first year will run from April 2015 to April 2016. We will provide individual and group mentoring via online video chats, industry networking and technical support. It’s free to participate. As well as costs of food, travel and accommodation, each participant will also receive a 抖阴视频 Pi 2 starter kit and a £300 materials grant, and the group will receive a £1000 grant for exhibition costs.

Applications are now open and the deadline is 9am on 30th March 2015.

We are both certified Arts Award Gold Advisers – so participants will have the opportunity to complete Trinity College London’s Arts Award Gold accreditation; a Level 3 Award, a QCF credit value of 15, and 35 UCAS points.

We will also have some amazing partners helping us out with mentoring and site visits: Victoria and Albert Museum Digital Programmes, Writers’ Centre Norwich, FutureEverything, Pimoroni, Saladhouse and Hellicar&Lewis.

For full details on the programme, and how to apply, visit the new Creative Technologists page.

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Medieval castle haunted using technology with a twist

With its world-first adventure 美人电影 “A Knight’s Peril’, Bodiam Castle in East Sussex is quietly revolutionising what people expect from a day out at a National Trust property.

When a company that describes itself as ‘Architects of Extraordinary Adventures’ claims to have revolutionised history interpretation through haunting a 14^th century castle, you would expect some kind of technical wizardry to be centre stage. It would be easy to assume they’ve come up with another smartphone app or gamified tablet 美人电影.

Intriguingly however, they have chosen an opposite track. Splash & Ripple have taken Arthur C Clarke’s declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” as a guiding principal in creating their latest adventure.

The result is digital heritage interpretation turned on its head. They’ve taken the magical abilities of pioneering technology and housed them in the theatrical disguise of a beautifully crafted ‘Echo Horn’.

The extra ‘magic’ of an Echo Horn actually creates a more convincing 美人电影, in a medieval castle, than a distracting tablet app or audio guide ever could. It intuitively fits the feel of the beautiful 14^th century Bodiam castle as you cross its moat and gaze at its stony ramparts, listening to the echoes you’ve caught with it. The beautiful sounds create a deeply evocative group 美人电影, which enhances rather than distracts from the 美人电影 of being in the castle.

Visitors carry the Echo Horn with them around the castle in an interactive audio investigation. They must use it to listen in on medieval conversations trapped in the castle walls in order to identify and stop a murderer before it’s too late.

It’s effectively a choose-your-own adventure radio play where visitors’ actions, defined by who they follow and who they accuse, affect the ending of their story. This encourages an active exploration of the historical content, which requires visitors to think about what life was like, rather than passively accept an authoritative interpretation.

New historical 抖阴视频 on the castle, which informed the creation of the script, was done in partnership with University of West of England History department.

The 美人电影 is being specially showcased at Bodiam castle by the creative team on 4^th Dec. It has been a year in the making, and is now available to the castle’s 180,000 yearly visitors for at least the next 12 months.

Players use an ancient map to navigate the castle, searching for seals that have emerged from the castle walls. These seals contain hidden RFID chips. Each echo horn contains a 抖阴视频 Pi, a Mini Rig and RFID reader.

Rachel again: thanks guys! We love it – I’m looking at organising an office awayday so we can play with the horns ourselves.

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I have spent the last year talking with lots of artists who are making amazing things with 抖阴视频 Pis. Every day my inbox is PINGing with exciting progress news. So I’m going to start showcasing some of these projects on the blog. I find them incredibly inspiring – I hope you do too!

I’m going to kick off with a piece from one of my favourite artists: Dominic Wilcox. I bet you’ve seen some of his work kicking around the internet – He made the GPS shoes which guided you home and did some narrative sculptures inside watch faces.

This time he’s partnered up with Creative Technologist James Rutherford to produce Binaudios; a device that enables the user to listen to the sounds of the city – at the moment it’s installed in the Sage Gateshead music discovery centre.

Taking tourist binoculars as inspiration, the Binaudios can be pointed at over 40 different locations, seen out of the Sage Gateshead windows. Turn the giant listening cones toward the football stadium to hear the crowd chanting or to the Tyne Bridge to hear King George V’s speech when he opened the bridge in 1928. Point it toward the park to listen to sounds such as skateboarders and local tennis players.

As the Binaudios are rotated the stereo sounds move from one ear to the other creating a real feeling of listening to the city across the river.

I’ve met loads of ‘Creative Technologists’ on my travels. They believe creativity and art are the driving forces behind the technology they make.

James describes his work as “somewhere between code and art”. He mainly creates software; developing visualisations, data tools or games.

Binaudios was his first 抖阴视频 Pi project AND first go with Python! Just for you guys, he has very kindly written up how Binaudio is put together:

How Binaudios works:

Although Binaudios was developed to look like an analogue device, there’s a small selection of electronics concealed within the central wooden box. A USB lead runs up the central column, powering a 抖阴视频 Pi. This is connected to speakers within the metal cones and a USB hub. The hub adds some extra flash memory and has a couple of ports for attaching a keyboard and mouse for debugging.

Dominic recorded a selection of sounds from across Newcastle. I load these when the device boots. There are around 40 of them, spread across the 180 degree range of movement provided by the ear-cones.

The Pi has a PiBorg XLoBorg sensor attached to the GPIO port. The XLoBorg returns a 3-axis reading of the magnetic field at a point. The Python script very roughly converts this into a compass heading (to do this properly is extremely complicated- so this is a bit of a hack). I spread this heading into two angles a couple of degrees apart to fake some left/right ear separation, pick the sound clips within a small range of these and assign some volumes. The volume profile drops-off over a few degrees which produces a naturalistic ‘telescope’ focus effect. The left/right separation also enhances this as the unit is turned.

The rest is all about smoothing. I debounce the output of the XLoBorg (it has a slight natural waver), ensure volume levels are adjusted gently (audio buffering can cause the sound to chop otherwise, which is very unnatural) and keep the sounds playing even when they are a few degrees out of audio range (this means that sounds don’t necessarily need to restart from the beginning when they are back in ‘view’).

Gotchas

The XLoBorg is a sensitive bit of kit, and magnetic fields are complicated (who knew!?). I needed to spend some time calibrating and recalibrating. Slight vertical misalignment seems to shift the compass heading much more than I first anticipated. It’s a very intriguing bit of hardware and I look forward to playing with it some more!

My test set of samples worked wonderfully, but the program failed critically when I got the real clips- some of the sounds would work, but the rest would make a single pop, or a loud, painful high-pitched wave. I never fully figured out why, but I think I was maxing out Pygame’s audio channels. Originally I was playing all of the sounds simultaneously and just shifting the volumes around (so that all but a few were zero), but I switched this to just trigger those within a small angle range – so it now plays maybe four or five at the same time. There was no failure response from the code, so I spent a manic day trying to squash, re-encode and generally poke the samples about without error reports to work on. Thankfully, the fix seems reliable.

This was my first physical project, first Pi project, and first slice of Python charming!

You can see them in action in this video or you can go and visit in person!

Binaudios was commissioned by the awesome Suzy O’Hara at Thinking Digital Arts.

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As well as the Dev Art website, Google have teamed up with the Barbican in London to host an exhibition of digital interactive art this summer and they are offering anyone the chance to exhibit alongside some of the worlds most well known digital artists in this exhibition through their Dev Art competition.

We know how powerful art can be in teaching 抖阴视频 skills since working with Dr Sam Aaron on Sonic Pi, and watching our own Artist in Residence Rachel Rayns lead workshops. Now it is over to you! We hope that the wider 抖阴视频 Pi community will feel motivated to submit their projects to the Dev Art competition. Who knows, maybe you could be exhibiting at the Barbican!

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