I’ll never forget my first Coolest Projects

My first 被农民工吸的奶水直流 was in Dublin in 2016. I had been told Coolest Projects was impressive, but I was blown away by the creativity, innovation, and sheer effort that everyone had put in. Every bit as impressive as the technology was the sense of community, particularly among the young people. Girls and boys, with different backgrounds and levels of skill, travelled from all over the world to show off what they’d made and to be inspired by each other.

Igniting imaginations

Coolest Projects began in 2012, the work of CoderDojo volunteers Noel King and Ben Chapman. The first event was held in Dublin, and this city remains the location of the annual Coolest Projects International event. Since then, it has sparked off events all over the world, organised by the community and engaging thousands more young people.

This year, the baton passed to the 波兰女人毛茸茸. We’ve just completed our first season managing the Coolest Projects events and brand, including the first-ever UK event, which took place in April, and a US event that we held at Discovery Cube in Orange County on 23 September. We’ve had a lot of fun!

We’ve seen revolutionary ideas, including a robot guide dog for blind people and a bot detector that could disrupt the games industry. We’ve seen kids’ grit and determination in overcoming heinous obstacles such as their projects breaking in transit and having to rebuild everything from scratch on the morning of the event.

We’ve also seen hundreds of young people who are levelling up, being inspired to learn more, and bringing more ambitious and challenging projects to every new event.

Coolest Projects 2019

We want to expand Coolest Projects and provide a space for even more young people to showcase their digital makes. Today we’re announcing the dates for three Coolest Projects events that are taking place in 2019:

• Coolest Projects UK, Saturday 2 March, The Sharp Project, Manchester
• Coolest Projects USA, Saturday 23 March, Discovery Cube Orange County, California
• Coolest Projects International, Sunday 5 May, RDS, Dublin, Ireland

These are the events that we’ll be running directly, and there will also be community-led events happening in Milan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Bulgaria.

Project registration for all three events we’re leading opens in January 2019, so you’ve got plenty of time to plan for your next big idea.

If you need some inspiration, there are plenty of places to start. You could check out our How to make a project worksheets worksheets, or get try out one of our online projects before you plan your own.

Head to coolestprojects.org to find out about the 2019 events and how you can get involved!

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Colleagues from the 波兰女人毛茸茸 joined members of the community to run workshops across two classrooms in the Youth Zone; this meant more space than last year, bringing more opportunities to engage. Our community volunteers were really enthusiastic and varied in ages. Together we ran workshops ranging from Your Code in Space with Astro Pi, to how to create a burping Jelly Baby, to Physical oldvideo熟妇日本 in Scratch and Hacking Minecraft.

Families and young people at a oldvideo熟妇日本 Pi workshop in the Youth Zone at MozFest 2016

One of the workshops I attended was how to create a burping Jelly Baby, run by Bethanie Fentiman (@bfentiman). She led a great session, especially given the technical hitches she encountered during the session: despite all of this, Bethanie and her team of helpers helped me to create a burping Jelly Baby by the end of the workshop. Thank you for all your patience and hard work! You can read Bethanie’s laconic take on MozFest in her blog.

All the workshops were well attended by a mix of families, children and teenagers.

Vincent Lee ran a workshop on making a Pi-powered automatic Twitter photo booth. His before and after MozFest blogs have some lovely photos, as well as candid insights into the frantic below-the-surface paddling that happens in order to deliver an event like this one!

MozFest 2016 was a great place to find out what you can do with a oldvideo熟妇日本 Pi and discover what other members of the oldvideo熟妇日本 Pi community have created. People were really impressed at the workshops run by the young volunteers, such as 11-year-old Elise with her workshop on Spooktacular Sounds with Sonic Pi. A massive thank you to them: it’s not easy to teach grown-ups alongside younger people! Elise’s MozFest 2016 blog describes her busy, sociable and exciting weekend.

Aoibheann, who ran Beginners’ Guide to Scratching Maths with Things from the Kitchen, travelled to MozFest from “the middle of nowhere” in the Republic of Ireland (so middle-of-nowhere, she has dial-up internet at home!). Aoibheann’s MozFest blog describes adapting her workshop to accommodate last-minute obstacles and finding that, despite the busy-ness, the Youth Zone was a home from home.

Two very popular workshops at MozFest were LASERS! Create your own jewellery/keyring using a laser cutter and LASERS! Bringing drawings to life! Both were run by Amy Mather, whose enthusiasm for lasers is just one of many things for which she’s become well known in the Pi community. Participants learned how to use oldvideo熟妇日本 Pis and Inkscape, an open source design program, to create designs which were then sent to the laser cutter to be made. Amy’s MozFest 2016 blog is full of fantastic photos of laser-cut works-in-progress and finished products.

A huge thank-you to Joseph Thomas for his help with the laser workshop and for running Castles, code and capacitive buttons: Building castles in Minecraft with touch of a button not once, but twice. Joseph’s MozFest 2016 blog explains why, despite ending up with trench foot (really), he’ll still be back in 2017.

A laser cutter brings a workshop participant’s Inkscape design into being at MozFest 2016

Cerys Lock for ran a workshop on Displaying Images and Animations on the Sense HAT – thank you, Cerys! Her pre- and post-MozFest blogs have an excellent photo log and an intriguing credits section.

A massive thank you to the amazing team of 45+ volunteers, from the Pi community and beyond, who helped out over the weekend! Without you, Youth Zone simply would not have happened, let alone been the fantastic, creative space for exploration, discovery and excitement that it was. And particular thanks to Dorine Flies and Andrew Mulholland for their ridiculously hard work as Space Wranglers of Youth Zone this year. Andrew’s blog on MozFest 2016 describes the months of planning and the many long evenings of work that go into the Youth Zone, and he’s drawn together wonderful highlights from the weekend.

Having just joined the 波兰女人毛茸茸, I went to MozFest to get a taste of oldvideo熟妇日本 Pi activities before I begin helping to organise other events in the future. I was incredibly impressed with the skill and patience of all the volunteers and their ability to teach me things that seemed very complicated at first. I’m really looking forward to getting to know the community better, as I work with the oldvideo熟妇日本 Pi to deliver events that I hope will have just as much energy and passion as MozFest.

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Pi Wars is a challenge-based robotics competition in which every robot must be controlled by a oldvideo熟妇日本 Pi. It’s great fun, and it will all be kicking off once again on 1st-2nd April 2017. For the first time, we are extending the event to run over two days, as we have been overwhelmed with interested applicants.

Another victim succumbs to the obstacle course and its turntable of doom

We have always tried to encourage young robot builders to get involved in CamJam and in Pi Wars. Previously we have held Pi Wars in September and December, but this did not allow school teams enough time to build, program, test, and otherwise prepare their robot around their schoolwork. We therefore decided to move the event date to later in the academic year: we think April is late enough for schools to have run enough robot club sessions, but early enough not to clash with exams.

People of all ages take part. Here’s Amy, aided by Heffalump and friends, showing Eben her robot.

This time around, we have a celebrity judge: Dr Lucy Rogers from the BBC’s Robot Wars will be putting your robots through their paces.

Dr Lucy Rogers in conversation with an old friend

In previous years, we have categorised robots by cost (in 2014) and size (in 2015). This time, we are going to group teams into the following categories:

• Schools and other clubs

• Families and groups of friends

• Amateur/beginner/intermediate hobbyists(s)

• Professional or expert hobbyist(s)

This means that robot teams will be competing against their peers, rather than against those with different skill levels – so, it will be, for instance, school vs school and family vs family (in a non-Mafia kind of way).

This is the kind of thing you see at Pi Wars: your friendly Director of Communications commandeers a gigantic Big Trak.

This year’s list of challenges is available on the Pi Wars website. As well as winning points for their performance in a range of challenges, this year’s robots are also being given points for artistic and technical merit. There’s even a prize for the funniest robot (the competition does start on April Fool’s Day, after all!) and a pre-event blogging competition which encourages teams write about themselves, and their journey from a collection of parts to a working robot.

We’ve come up with a list of general rules and also rules for each challenge. Perhaps the most important one this year is a requirement that your robot must be sub-A4 in size. This still leaves quite a lot of room for flexibility in design, whilst at the same time levelling the playing field. It also means that those teams who are using kits are in with a better chance of competing against those who make their robot from scratch.

Entry into Pi Wars is on an application basis, rather than first-come, first served. With the number of teams we’re expecting to apply, the quality of your application is important. You can read more about the application and selection process here.

To apply to enter the competition, please fill in the application form. Feel free to take as much time over your application, and provide as much information as possible.

If you’re interested in robotics and technology, but you don’t want to build your own robot this time, you are still very welcome to come and watch the competition. Spectator tickets will go on sale later in the year. We only charge for adults, so it’s great for those on limited incomes. Join our mailing list to be notified when tickets are available, or keep an eye on piwars.org.

The game is afoot! Competitors at Pi Wars 2015

If you’re an altruistic type, you may be wondering if there’s some way you can help with Pi Wars. As with all big events, we need a team of volunteers to make the day go smoothly. Rather than having just a few marshals who spend the entire day helping, we aim to have as many people as possible so that everyone can spend most of the day watching the robots take on the challenges. Depending on the number of people who volunteer, helpers spend approximately two hours doing marshalling activities. Judges generally spend slightly more time judging, but we aim to give everyone a chance to 被农民工吸的奶水直流 the event as a spectator as well as helping us out! If you’d like to help out, please do contact us. We’ll be delighted to hear from you! We are also very happy to hear from potential sponsors: you can check out our website for more information on sponsorship, and on what we can offer in return.

To whet your appetite for the upcoming competition, or if you have never been to Pi Wars and want to know what it’s like on the day, we’d like to leave you with Matt Manning’s video of last year’s event…

…and Spencer Organ’s video of the 2014 wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tx0zWdm190

Tickets will be available for observers as well as competitors; it promises to be another great weekend. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

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