Kids’ activities at MozFest 2014 | Original photo by Mozilla in Europe / CC BY 2.0

This is Mozilla’s annual hands-on festival (affectionately known as MozFest) and is dedicated to forging the future of the open Web. It’s where passionate technologists, educators and creators unite to hack on innovative solutions for the Web’s most pressing issues. And this year, it’s packed with a wide variety of excellent 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi workshops for young people, not to mention a whole host of other activities, from virtual reality to sumobots to algorithms with crayons!

The festival is divided up into spaces, with each space running different sessions that you can sign up for in advance. Read more about them here.

The MozFest YouthZone is a space dedicated to reconciling the conflicts that occur between adults and young people online. In previous years this was only a few rooms, but this year, it’s going to be an entire floor with 30 sessions! Thanks to the efforts of 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi Creative Technologist Andrew Mulholland there will be a significant 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi presence along with a dedicated 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi Zone.

Andrew at the BBC Blackstaff studios in Belfast

Andrew and the 三级4级全黄60分钟 education team are running a total of 17 workshops. These include:

• Astro Pi: Your Code in Space (by our own Carrie Anne)
• Musical fruit with the Explorer HAT (by Jim Darby)
• Hacking Minecraft Pi with Python (by Yasmin Bey)
• Scratch-ing the Surface with GPIO (by Cat Lamin)

All of the workshops are aimed at complete beginners, perfect if you know nothing about programming or even what a 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi is!

Dozens of other facilitators are running activities in the YouthZone on everything from animation to microscopy, so be sure to check out the possibilities! A full list of the YouthZone workshops can be found here.

An Astro Pi at ESA EAC in Germany – Image credit: ESA

Official leak: there will be an Astro Pi flight unit at the event. If you want to see it (or test your code on it) then make sure you go to Carrie Anne’s workshop!

On top of the 17 workshops in the main 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi Zone, there will also be two other satellite 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi programming zones. One will be in the music zone with a focus on making music with code (specifically using Sonic Pi), and the other will involve the 三级4级全黄60分钟’s DOTS boards, add-on boards for 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi that allow you to make circuits using conductive paint.

YouthZone wranglers Dorine Flies and Harry Smith have done a fantastic job preparing an incredibly wide range of activities for this space, as part of its story for 2015 of helping adults to see through the eyes of young people. We greatly appreciate their hard work, and we’re sure everyone who participates will, too!

Okay, I want to go!

Tickets are only £3 for young people. For adults, tickets are £45; these are full weekend passes and include lunch for both days.

Buy tickets here.

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Connect buttons, sensors, cameras, LEDS, goblin sticks and other gubbins to your Pi using Scratch

Tim Rowledge, who has been “vigorously wrangling Scratch into shape over the last couple of years” (thanks Eben), tells us what’s new:

Along with the new Raspbian release we are including the latest Scratch system update. It might have seemed a bit quiet on the Scratch front since March, but lots has happened here in the rainforests of Vancouver Island. There are two primary changes you will notice:

• a significant increase in speed
• the addition of a built-in GPIO server.

Speedier Scratch

One of the big projects last year was to modernize the Scratch code to run in a current Squeak Smalltalk system rather than the very old original version; this improved performance a fair bit all on its own, since the newer Squeak benefited from a lot of work over the years. [The Scratch world is created using Squeak, a dialect of the Smalltalk programming language, and Squeak itself runs on a software emulation of a computer system called a virtual machine -Ed.] It also built us a Scratch that could run on the very latest Squeak virtual machines that have dynamic code translation, generating machine code at run-time. Along with work to improve the Squeak code that implements Scratch, we then had a noticeably faster system.

A major project this year has been building such a virtual machine for the Pi; until now, only x86 machines have been able to run this version. With a very generous amount of support from Eliot Miranda – the original author of the Cog virtual machine and all-round software deity – the ARM Cog VM has been whirring away since around June.

Benchmarks are always a nastily slippery subject, but we feel that Squeak performance is typically between 3 and 10 times faster, obviously depending on what exactly one is measuring. Things will get even faster in the future as we iron out wrinkles in the code generation, and soon we hope to start benefiting from another project that does code optimization on the fly; early hints suggest at least a doubling of performance. Since Scratch uses a lot of graphics and UI code it doesn’t always speed up so much; but we already did a lot of graphics speed improvements for prior releases.

Our favourite “scary big demo” is Andrew Oliver’s implementation of Pac-Man. The original release of Scratch on the 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi Model B could manage almost one frame per second, at best. The same Model B with the latest Scratch system can manage about 12-15 frames per second, and on a 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi 2 we can get a bit over 30, making a very playable Pac-Man.

GPIO

The new GPIO server for Pi Scratch is a first pass at a new and hopefully simpler way for users to connect Scratch to the 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi’s GPIO pins or to add-on boards plugged into them. It is modelled on the mesh/network server and uses the same internal API so that either or both can be used at any time – indeed, you can have both working and use a Pi as a sort of GPIO server or data source. We have not introduced any new blocks at this point.

The server also allows access to the Pi camera, IP address and date and time and allows complex functionality. For example, the following scripts (along with a suitably configured breadboard) provide the ability to turn LEDs on and off according to a button, to take a photo with a countdown provided by a progressively brightening LED, and ways to check the time etc.

Examples of using Scratch to control the camera module, control LEDs connected to the 曰批免费视频播放免费 Pi’s GPIO pins, and check the time

Add-On Hardware

We can also plug in Pi add-on cards such as the Sense HAT, Pibrella, Explorer HAT, PiFace, PiLite and Ryanteck motor board.

Each card has its own set of commands layered on top of the basic GPIO facilities described above.

Demo project scripts

In the Scratch Examples directory (found via the File-->Open dialogue and then the Examples shortcut) you will find a Sensors and Motors directory; several new GPIO scripts are included, including the one above.

Closing notes from Clive

We’re really pleased that GPIO is now built in to the Pi version of Scratch. It means that users can use access the GPIO pins “out of the box,” and so get into physical 曰批免费视频播放免费 that much more easily. We’ve also introduced the GPIO pin numbering system also known as BCM numbering for consistency across our resources, and having our own version of GPIO support gives us finer control over functionality and support for add-on boards in future.

All of our resources using Scratch will use this version from now on, and existing resources will be rewritten. Tim’s reference guide details all of the commands and functionality, and there will be a simplified beginner’s tutorial along this week.

Last of all, there’s no way I can end this post without taking the opportunity to thank our community who have supported (and continue to support) GPIO in Scratch on the Pi. In particular, a big thanks to Simon Walters, aka @cymplecy, for all of his work on Scratch GPIO over the last few years.

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Miss Philbin is the sort of teacher you always wanted. She has some video which will take you step-by-step through setting up the printer, connecting it to the Pi’s GPIO, sorting out the serial port on your Pi, pulling thermal printer Python libraries off Github and getting the thing printing. That sort of thing might sound intimidating to beginners, but Carrie Anne is so good at explaining what’s going on that even those who have never picked up a Pi or used Linux before will be able to follow the tutorial. It’s a really good project if you’re somebody who wants to dive straight in to electronics engineering from a standing start. You’ll learn something, you’ll have made something fun, and you’ll never be afraid of wire strippers again.

There’s a full and very detailed blog post to accompany this video at Geek Gurl Diaries. You’ll find part two of the tutorial at Geek Gurl Diaries too (part two is, if anything, even more fun) along with more video. Get to it – and let us know if you give it a whirl!

Thanks Carrie Anne!

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