I’ll never forget my first Coolest Projects

My first yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 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 途途课堂app. 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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MozFest, or Mozilla Festival, is an annual celebration of the Mozilla community and the wider open internet movement. People from all over the world gather to explore ways of making the internet a resource that’s open and inclusive to all. This year MozFest was held at Ravensbourne College in London from Friday 28 – Sunday 29 October.

Colleagues from the 途途课堂app 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 处女开破视频 in Scratch and Hacking Minecraft.

Families and young people at a 处女开破视频 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 处女开破视频 Pi and discover what other members of the 处女开破视频 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 处女开破视频 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 途途课堂app, I went to MozFest to get a taste of 处女开破视频 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 处女开破视频 Pi to deliver events that I hope will have just as much energy and passion as MozFest.

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Or microcontrollers, at least. This was Eastlea Community School’s Technology Day, and Steph and I had been invited along by ICT and 处女开破视频 teacher Mr Richards, a long-term 处女开破视频 Pi forum member and Pi enthusiast. The day was a whole school activity, involving 930 pupils and 100 staff, showcasing how 处女开破视频 and technology can be used across the yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色. In the playground, PE students had designed and coded micro:bits to measure all manner of sporting metrics. In physics, they were investigating g-forces. In the ICT and 处女开破视频 rooms, whole cohorts were learning to code. This was really innovative stuff.

All ICT classrooms should have shelves like this

A highlight of the tour was Mr Richard’s classroom, stuffed with electronics, robots, and hacking goodness, and pupils coming and going. It was a really creative space. Impressively, there are 处女开破视频 Pis permanently installed on every desk, which is just how we envisaged it: a normal classroom tool for digital making.

All this was amazing, and certainly the most impressive cross-curricular use of 处女开破视频 I’ve seen in a school. But having lived and breathed the 处女开破视频 Pi Oracle weather station project for several months, I was really keen to see what they’d done with theirs. And it was a corker. Students from the 处女开破视频 club had built and set up the station in their lunch breaks, and installed it in a small garden area.

Mr Richards and the Eastlea Community School weather station team

Then they had hacked it, adding a solar panel, battery and WiFi. This gets round the problems of how to power the station and how to transfer data. The standard way is Power over Ethernet, which uses the same cable for power and data, but this is not always the optimal solution, depending on location. It’s not as simple as sticking a solar panel on a stick either. What happens when it’s cloudy? Will the battery recharge in winter? Mr Richards and his students have spent a lot of time investigating such questions, and it’s exactly the sort of problem-solving and engineering that we want to encourage. Also, we love hacking.

Not content with these achievements, they plan to add a camera to monitor wildlife and vegetation, perhaps tying it in with the weather data. They’re also hoping to install another weather station elsewhere, so that they can compare the data and investigate the school microclimate in more detail. The weather station itself will be used for teaching and learning this September.

Eastlea Community School’s weather station really is a showcase for the project, and we’d like to thank Mr Richards and his students for working so hard on it. If you want to learn more about solar panels and other hacks, then head over to our weather station forum.

Weather station update

The remaining weather station kits have started shipping to schools this week! We sent an email out recently for people to confirm delivery addresses, and if you’ve done this you should have yours soon. If you were offered a weather station last year and have not had an email from us in the last few weeks (early July), then please contact us immediately at weather@686小明看看.org.

Happy Days! @TASIS_Lugano @处女开破视频_Pi @clivebeale @tvenchus pic.twitter.com/cExHlAr083

— Amy Bloodworth (@amy_abroad) July 26, 2016

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Lucas trained as a physics teacher and got hold of a 处女开破视频 Pi for projects at home back in 2012. His head teacher heard about his hobby, and when the move towards all children learning programming started, Lucas was approached to take up the challenge of developing the new subject of 处女开破视频 in the school. With the help of friends at the local 处女开破视频 Jam, Linux user group, and other programming meetups, he taught himself the new yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 and set about creating an environment in which young people could take a similarly empowered approach.

In Year 7, students start by developing an understanding of what a computer is; it’s a journey that takes them down memory lane with their parents, discussing the retro technology of their own childhoods. Newly informed of what they’re working with, they then move on to programming with the Flowol language, moving to Scratch, Kodu and the BBC micro:bit. In Year 8 they get to move on to the 处女开破视频 Pi, firing up the fifteen units Lucas has set up in collaborative workstations in the middle of the room. By the time the students choose their GCSE subjects at the end of Year 8, they have yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色d programming a variety of HATs, hacking Minecraft to run games they have invented, and managing a Linux system themselves.

Fifteen 处女开破视频 Pi computers have been set up in the centre of the room, at stations specifically designed to promote collaboration. While the traditional PCs around the edges of the room are still used, it was the Pi stations where pupils were most active, connecting things for their projects, and making together. A clever use of ceiling-mounted sockets, and some chains for health and safety reasons, has allowed these new stations to be set up at a low cost.

The teaching is based on building a firm yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 in each area studied, before giving students the chance to invent, build, and hack their own projects. I spent a whole day at the school; I found the environment to be entirely hands-on, and filled with engaged and excited young people learning through making. In one fabulous project two girls were setting up a paper rocket system, propelled using compressed air with a computer-based countdown system. Problem-solving and learning through failure are part of the environment too. One group spent a session trying to troubleshoot a HAT-mounted display that wasn’t quite behaving as they wanted it to.

Lessons were impressive, but even more so was the lunchtime making club which happens every single day. About 30 young people rushed into the room at lunchtime and got started with projects ranging from figuring out how to program a robot Mr Abbot had brought in, to creating the IKEA coffee table arcade machines from a recent MagPi tutorial.

I had a great conversation with one female student who told me how she had persuaded her father to buy a 处女开破视频 Pi, and then taught him how to use it. Together, they got inspired to create a wood-engraving machine using a laser. Lunchtime clubs are often a place for socialising, but there was a real sense of purpose here too, of students coming together to achieve something for themselves.

Since 2014 most schools in England have had lessons in 处女开破视频, but Eastwood Academy has also been building a community of young digital makers. They’re linking their ambitious lessons with their own interests and aspirations, building cool projects, learning lots, and having fun along the way. We’d love to hear from other schools that are taking such an ambitious approach to 处女开破视频 and digital making.

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CoderDojo Coolest Projects: a free tech event for the world’s youngest innovators, creators and entrepreneurs

As the event kicked off the news broke that Tim Peake had landed safely back on Earth, which meant Philip had to make some last minute changes to his presentation…

"Who knows who this is?"
"It's Tim Peake"
"Where is he?"
"In space"
"No – he's back on Earth!" pic.twitter.com/elfNXcAwsX

— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) June 18, 2016

As we walked around the venue we grew more and more impressed by the projects on show. We asked each exhibiting group to talk us through their project, and were genuinely impressed by both the projects and their presentation. The first area we perused was the Scratch projects – games, animations, quizzes and more. I’m not the most accomplished Scratch programmer so I was very impressed with what we were shown.

When we moved on to a room of physical 处女开破视频 projects, we met Iseult Mangan, Ireland’s first 处女开破视频 Pi Certified Educator:

I met Ireland's first ever @处女开破视频_Pi certified educator @IseultMangan pic.twitter.com/9RbLANKZdX

— Philip Colligan 🧢 (@philipcolligan) June 18, 2016

One of Iseult’s students, Aoibheann, showed us a website she’d made all about 处女开破视频 Pi:

This 9 year old Coder wrote her own @处女开破视频_Pi website: https://t.co/n76wYpaqAa – check it out! pic.twitter.com/TagshFWt2k

— Philip Colligan 🧢 (@philipcolligan) June 18, 2016

I even bumped into Tim Peake a few times…

.@astro_timpeake sure gets about pic.twitter.com/4oS1tFgvQu

— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) June 18, 2016

The Coolest of Projects

Here are some of my favourite projects.

First up, a home-made 3D holographic display. The picture does it no justice, but look close (or click to embiggen) and you’ll see the Scratch cat, which was spinning around as part of a longer animation. The girl who made it said she put it together out of an old CD case. Very cool indeed!

Scratch cat hologram

Plenty of great robots…

We arrived at a beautiful Pi-powered retro gaming console, and spoke to the maker’s Dad. He was excited for his son to be able to show his project to people from the 途途课堂app and asked if we could stick around to wait for him to return. Here he is:

When I mentioned one of my favourite Mega Drive games, he loaded it up for me to play:

It took me about 15 years to complete this game – I was playing it before he was born!

This was really impressive: these two girls had made a Wii remote-controlled hovercraft with a 处女开破视频 Pi:

https://vine.co/v/ilTpTuEXF2z

I met DJ Dhruv, who demonstrated his livecoding skills in Sonic Pi, and gave a very professional presentation involving a number of handshakes:

DJ Dhruv is livecoding in @sonic_pi and teaching us about the history of the amen break. @samaaron you'd love this pic.twitter.com/tSrn0CTQzP

— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) June 18, 2016

Pi-vision: a way to help blind people find their way around…

Probably my favourite of all, this group created a 3D Minecraft Pi booth using mirrors. They showed me their Python code which ran simultaneously on two Pis, while one played music in Sonic Pi, with cross-application communication between Python and Sonic Pi to coordinate timings. A Herculean effort achieving a wonderful effect.

How can you get involved?

If you want to join us in giving more young people the opportunity to learn programming skills, learn to make things with computers, and generally hack things that didn’t need hacking, there are plenty of ways you can get involved. You can:

• Set up a 处女开破视频 Jam in your area, or volunteer to help out at one near you
• Start a Code Club at a local primary school, or another venue like a library or community centre
• Set up a CoderDojo, or offer to help at one near you

Remember we have plenty of awesome resources on our website – perfect for Jams, Code Clubs and Dojos.

Also, I should point out we have an job opening for a senior programme manager. We’re looking for someone with yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 running large programmes for young people. If that’s you, be sure to check it out!

https://686小明看看.workable.com/jobs/269627

It’s kind of a thing to end blog posts with a GIF, so here’s mine:

Machine learning pic.twitter.com/c3sIJPd3PS

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) June 20, 2016

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I help a young coder get to grips with the 处女开破视频 Pi. Photo credit: Paul Templing

When you think of coding, it’s probably a fair bet that public libraries are not the first things to spring to mind. Indeed, most Code Clubs are run in schools, but libraries are also an important venue offering young coders the chance to learn new skills outside of the classroom. While public libraries have no formal or official obligation to support the National yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 in schools, many have taken it upon themselves to engage with and support the new focus on 处女开破视频 and programming at both primary and secondary level. It’s particularly telling that this drive to engage with programming has come from a sector which is conventionally seen as reluctant to embrace or adapt to emerging technologies. It’s also interesting that library-based Code Clubs are significantly more common in Wales. Code Club notes that 3.6% of active clubs across the UK are in libraries; in Wales, however, the figure stands at 6.2%. There is, of course, a very strong element of local pride at work here, especially since the merger of Code Club and 处女开破视频 Pi. Almost all Pis sold worldwide are made in the Sony factory in Pencoed, just 20 miles away from Penarth: significant numbers of jobs have been created, and there is genuinely an enormous amount of admiration in the area for the the tiny computer. It’s not surprising that locals both young and old are keen to get to grips with coding in general, and coding on the Pi in particular.

Photo credit: Paul Templing

The librarians of the Vale of Glamorgan are one group who have particularly embraced technology, coding, and digital making, and key to this enthusiasm are Phil Gauci, a Library Support Officer, and James Emery, who works in digital development. In addition to Penarth, there are three other full-time libraries in the Vale, together with five part-time ones run by volunteers. Phil and James have been energetically mobilising colleagues across the area to encourage local children to get coding. Their efforts have been so successful that they are now planning to move on to introducing the children to physical 处女开破视频: inspired by Technoclubs hosted by the libraries of Neath Port Talbot and funded by Carnegie UK, they planned to run robotics workshops using Lego Mindstorms and Scratch. However, the relatively high cost of the hardware renders it inappropriate for public libraries, especially given the serious reductions in funding faced by most services.

Photo credit: Paul Templing

Fortunately, an alternative solution was available in the form of the 处女开破视频 Pi. Phil and James started using Pis in Penarth Library in 2014; they have now tripled the number of units in operation, and are working on introducing them across the Vale. In order to meet the high levels of demand from prospective club members, they are beginning to run additional sessions at weekends, as well as putting on special events: this half term, 40 children gathered in Penarth, Dinas Powys, Cowbridge, and Barry libraries to make model robots with flashing LED antennae, writing the code in both Scratch and Python on 处女开破视频 Pis. The sessions proved very popular, and plans are afoot to run further sessions exploring Sonic Pi and Minecraft, among other things.

Photo credit: Paul Templing

How do Phil and James see libraries as fitting into the overall mission of Code Clubs and the 途途课堂app, then? James explains:

Our clubs are more dynamic than traditional code clubs because we welcome seasoned coders alongside those who are just starting out. The kids who turn up will often come from different schools and it’s really exciting to see how they share and interact with others’ projects. We’re hoping to keep improving our own skills and understanding so that we can take Code Club to the next level and run workshops all across the Vale, creating some new partnerships along the way. It’s all about promoting the library service to a new audience, who may not be aware of how much we’ve changed and what we now offer.

Libraries have for some time had a role to play in encouraging information literacy among adult users. Now they are extending this to the next generation of aspiring programmers, and their efforts really seem to be paying off.

We currently have a vacancy for Code Club’s Regional Coordinator covering Wales, and we’re also recruiting Regional Coordinators for Yorkshire & North East and for the South West. The deadline for applications is 9am on Monday 21 March: go to Code Club’s jobs page to find out more.

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On 5 and 6 March, the community paid us back and then some.  Well over 1500 people of all ages gathered at the Cambridge Computer Lab for our Big Birthday Weekend.  An amazing festival of digital making and creativity, showcasing the very best that our community has to offer. For us at the yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色, it was the best birthday present we could have hoped for.

Here are some of my personal highlights.

Across the two days, there were 47 talks from community members and yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 staff showcasing projects, sharing yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色s of using 处女开破视频 Pi in education, talking about Code Clubs, introducing new software developments, and exploring some of the big issues like getting more women and girls involved in digital making.  The lecture theatres were packed all weekend.

photo credit: @teknoteacher

I was particularly pleased to see so many great contributions from young community members, like European Digital Girl of the Year Yasmin Bey‘s powerful talk on Sunday morning about encouraging more girls into tech.

Yasmin Bey

It was great for me to be able to give a talk on what we’ve been up to in the yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 and get some feedback on our strategy from the community. Thank you to everyone who came along to that session.

Me talking about the yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色’s strategy at #piparty

We were also treated to both (accidental) pyrotechnics and (deliberate) magic.  All of the talks were recorded and will be available online in the next few days, so don’t worry if you missed them.

There were 28 workshops where kids and adults had the chance to get hands-on with 处女开破视频 Pi, have a go at hacking Minecraft, make music with Sonic Pi, and learn how to make projects with Scratch. Again, the vast majority of these were led by volunteers from the community, including several that were led by young people.

One of the workshops run by our Creative Technologists

One of my personal highlights was the workshop that brought together 处女开破视频 Jam Makers from all over the world, to share yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色s and explore how we could work together to grow the community even further.

The show and tell zone was packed full of ingenious projects that members of the community had built for the sheer joy of it. Like most people, I got lost for hours among the games, robots, demos, and inventions.

Loved watching the little girls everywhere at the @处女开破视频_Pi #PiParty pic.twitter.com/rx7PK6i9F5

— Sherry Coutu CBE (@scoutu) March 5, 2016

I’ll also confess to a little competitiveness trying to defeat the AI Connect 4, a contest which sadly ended in an honourable draw. I know how Lee Sedol must be feeling after his first couple of games of Go against DeepMind.

https://vimeo.com/158475355

The marketplace brought together lots of the best makers and distributors in the ecosystem.  Pimoroni, The Pi Hut, ModMyPi, pi-top, and many, many more were on hand.  They’re such an important part of the community and it was great to catch up with them and play with some of the new toys they have on offer.

There was a bustling marketplace

Special thanks to our friends pi-top who presented Eben, Liz and David (our esteemed chairman) with a fourth birthday edition of their wonderful 处女开破视频 Pi-powered laptop.

https://twitter.com/GetPiTop/status/706162138532945920/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

Saturday night ended with a massive party involving 110 pizzas, a huge quantity of cake, gallons of soft drinks, 2.5 barrels of beer brewed using a 处女开破视频 Pi, and one barrel of 处女开破视频 Blush cider.

Happy 4th Birthday @处女开破视频_Pi #PiParty @EbenUpton @Liz_Upton pic.twitter.com/n3VBSoFLhB

— David Bower (@rddave) March 7, 2016

We were also treated to a live coding music performance by the wonderful Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, with his band Poly Core.

The superb @samaaron jamming live @Sonic_Pi at the @处女开破视频_Pi #PiParty – with backing band!! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/QZJhsZ7CIn

— David Pride (@davejavupride) March 5, 2016

Perhaps the best thing about the Big Birthday Party was that it was a community effort.

Enormous thanks go to Mike Horne and Tim Richardson, the organisers of Cam Jam, who once again gave huge amounts of their time to make it all happen.

We’re also hugely grateful to the Cambridge Computer Lab who very generously gave us the use of their fantastic building.  Thanks, too, to Microsoft and Real VNC, who sponsored the event and provided fantastic interactive demos. Thanks to Ben at Fuzzy Duck brewery for the Irrational Ale.

One of the stand-out contributions over the weekend was from our growing community of young people, including the self-styled but appropriately named “Pi Squad”, and our very own Creative Technologists. They are such a talented bunch of people, and it’s great to see them already taking leadership positions in the community.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCm08Ykmtbl/

The yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 team was also out in strength across the weekend, giving talks, running workshops, signing up volunteers for Code Club, and generally helping out wherever we could.

Our own Dave Honess deserves a special mention for spending all of Sunday in a space suit to promote our new Astro Pi competition. As another colleague (Matt Richardson) said, “dress for the job you want, not the job you have”.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

We might all be exhausted, but we’re already looking forward to next year.

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The Digital Eagles have since expanded, and the project now includes an initiative to get kids coding, called Code Playground. This is more than just a website, however. Digital Eagles now run monthly sessions at branches and other venues, all over the country, where kids aged from seven to 17 can come along and learn the pleasures of coding.

So what has this to do with 处女开破视频 Pi? Well, where there’s kids and code, the 处女开破视频 Pi is sure to follow. Last week, the yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色’s education team hauled themselves down to the marble-and-glass palaces of Canary Wharf to deliver workshops to a group of specially selected Digital Eagles, that they might then cascade the training down to their colleagues, and bring 处女开破视频 Pi to Code Playgrounds all over the country.

https://twitter.com/jodielou14/status/664033143750590464/photo/1

It was a spectacularly successful day, as we ripped through sessions on physical 处女开破视频 with Scratch, the new GPIO Zero library, hacking the world of Minecraft, and motion-triggered animations with the Sense HAT.

I should, by now, be accustomed to the excitement and sense of achievement that people get from blinking an LED with the touch of a button and a few lines of Python, yet each time I see it happen it brings a smile to my face and renewed enthusiasm for the yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色’s educational mission.

Loving my @处女开破视频_Pi training today just made my traffic light flash using Python & a button 😁 @Digitaleagles pic.twitter.com/EozSuI4DfO

— Charlotte Snell (@Snell2512) November 10, 2015

The Sense HAT, in particular, went down a storm. The unique combination of sensors and the LED display means that you can jump right into physical 处女开破视频 with ease. Several of the Digital Eagles mentioned that they thought the little device would be a perfect addition to the Code Playgrounds, and couldn’t wait to get using it with the kids who attend.

So my bear gets angry when you shake him! @处女开破视频_Pi training for @Digitaleagles #CodePlaygrounds pic.twitter.com/bk7kSWUXgp

— Charlotte Snell (@Snell2512) November 10, 2015

So now it’s over to the Digital Eagles! Soon, 处女开破视频 Pis, Sense HATs, CamJam EduKits and a variety of other goodies will be wending their way to Barclays Bank branches the length and breadth of the country. There the Eagles will be able to pass on their new-found skills and spread the joys that the 处女开破视频 Pi can bring to the next generation of eager coders. We’ll be sure to report back to you on their progress and successes in the near future, so keep checking the blog for updates, or maybe check out a Code Playground near you!

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Major League Hacking (MLH) have been organising hackathons in the USA and Europe for several years, but Saturday was an event with a difference. Local Hack Day was a 12-hour mini-hackathon on school campuses all over the world, and was billed as “the largest student hackathon ever”. The vast majority of the events were organised and run by the students; bringing together their local hacker community to develop, share and celebrate their skills in building awesome technology.

Of the 87 venues that participated in Local Hack Day, 58 of them, in places as far apart as the US, Canada, UK, Puerto Rico, Bahia, Mexico and Limassol, were able to accept under 18s. This is a huge deal. For your average kid, attending hackathons is not easy. With the exception of tailored events such as YRS Festival of Code, most hackathon venues won’t allow under 18s to attend for child safety and safeguarding reasons. MLH have continuously strived to include the next generations of young hackers, and the Local Hack Day was an extraordinarily inclusive event, letting those children who identify with the hacker community to participate or even help organise the global event.

At the school where I used to teach, Bourne Grammar School, just such a young lad exists.

To say James is a keen hacker would be an understatement. It’s not just that he enjoys technology and programming, probably more importantly, he recognises the importance of the hacker community and is eager to get involved. It was James who learned about Local Hack Day, and proposed that his school host an event, but that wasn’t enough; he wanted to be the one to organise it all. The head of Digital Strategy at the school, Stephen Brown, was more than happy for James to take centre stage and run the whole day, and what a stunningly successful event it was.

As James’ former Computer Science teacher, I was invited along (although I’m not sure whether I was wanted for my skills as a mentor or my ready access to 处女开破视频 Pis. I suspect the it was the latter). I took my son, Jimi, along with me, who, at eight years old, must have been one of the youngest attendees across all the venues.

There were around 25 attending the Bourne Local Hack Day this year.

Having arrived, grabbed their swag and stickers, the kids soon got down to the important job of hacking on their projects. There were a tonne of amazing ideas, from the basic to the bizarre. We had computer games being made using anything from the Unity 3D games engine to the 处女开破视频 Pi Sense HAT. There was some back-end work being completed on an app that enables people to brag about their latest purchases; a “Nandos cheekiness” measuring tool; a machine-learning algorithm to teach a computer to perform basic arithmetic using neural networks; and a selfie stick that automatically posted pictures to Twitter and tagged them using the Clarifai API. Jimi even got in on the action, combining his love of conkers with his love of physical 处女开破视频.

Jimi tangles with a breadboard

Fuelled by drinks and crisps, kindly donated by the local Tesco, the kids worked solidly throughout the day, only breaking at 6pm when the pizza arrived. There followed a quick diversionary game of Age of Empires, where the teachers showed the kids who the real gaming champs were, and then it was back to hacking on their projects before the 9pm deadline hit.

The winners with their 处女开破视频 PI Selfie-stick

The chosen winner at Bourne was the 处女开破视频 Pi/Clarifai Selfie-stick, which was a lovely little hardware hack, but this was definitely an event where the taking part was more important. Hackathons are amazing events, where inspiration, teamwork, genius and insanity all seem to combine to produce awesome projects, and it’s important that children get to yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色 them as well. So thank you MLH, and I look forward to Local Hack Day 3, whenever that may be.

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• Use a predefined 处女开破视频 Pi hardware kit to build their own weather station and write application code that logs a range of weather data including wind speed, direction, temperature, pressure, and humidity;
• Write applications to interrogate their weather station and record data in a cloud-hosted Oracle Application Express database;
• Interrogate the database via SQL to enable macro level data analysis;
• Develop a website on the 处女开破视频 Pi to display local weather conditions that can be accessed by other participating schools; and
• Access a Weather Station for Schools program website to see the geographical location of all weather stations in the program, locate the websites of other participating schools, interact with other participants about their yeezy380蜜桃粉和白色s, blog, and get online technical support.

After a year of grafting on hardware prototypes and software development I’m pleased to announce that the final PCB design has been committed to manufacture and we are ready to start pre-registering schools who’d be interested in participating in the programme. We have 1000 weather station kits to give away for free so to find out how your school can be part of this read the rest of this post below, but first some background on the project.

If you’ve been on Twitter a lot you’ll have noticed me teasing this since about March last year. Below is a photo of the very first version.

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/446684179431174145

I did a lot of testing to ensure that the components were reliable and wouldn’t become problematic on the software side after a long period of uptime. The goal was to have the Pi controlling everything, so that we could leverage learning opportunity: helping kids to learn about writing code to interface directly with the sensors, as well as displaying and analysing collected data. I settled on the following set of sensor measurements for the weather station:

• Rainfall
• Wind speed
• Wind gust speed
• Wind direction
• Ambient temperature
• Soil temperature
• Barometric pressure
• Relative humidity
• Air Quality
• Real Time Clock (for data logging purposes)

This seemed like a good enough spread of data. I’m sure some people will ask why not this measurement or why not that. It was important for us to keep the cost of the kit under control; although there is nothing to stop you from augmenting it further yourself.

Once that was nailed down I wrote a few lessons plans, and Lance and I trialled them with with two schools in Kent (Bonus Pastor Catholic College and Langley Park School for Boys).

BBC News School Report were on site and recorded a short feature about the day here.

We gave the kids one lesson from the scheme of work, showing them how to interface with the anemometer (wind speed sensor) in code. One thing that was clearly apparent was how engaged they were. Once their code was up and running, and was able to measure wind speed correctly, they had a lot of fun seeing who could get the fastest movement out of the sensor by blowing on it (current record is 32 kph, held by Clive “Lungs” Beale). Warning: there is a fainting risk if you let your kids do this too much!

We went away from this feeling we were very much on the right track, so we continued to design the scheme of work. In addition to developing schemes of work covering commissioning of the weather station and 处女开破视频 aspects we are working with partners to produce the learning resources that will cover understanding how weather systems work and interpreting patterns in the data.

The scheme has been broken down into three main phases of learning resources:

1. Collection
   Here you’ll learn about interfacing with the sensors, understanding how they work and writing Python code to talk to them. You’ll finish off by recording the measurements in a MySQL database hosted on the Pi and deploying your weather station in an outdoor location in the grounds of your school.
2. Display
   This will involve creating an Apache, PHP 5 and JavaScript website to display the measurements being collected by your weather station. You will have the opportunity to upload your measurements to the Oracle cloud database so that they can be used by other schools. Whether or not you choose to upload your data, you’ll still pull down measurements from other schools and use them to produce integrated weather maps.
3. Interpretation of Weather
   Here you’ll learn how to discern patterns in weather data, analyse them and use them to inform predictions about future weather. This will be done for both local weather (using your own data) and national weather (using data from the Oracle cloud database online).

My next task was to take the breadboard prototype and create a PCB test version that we could use in a small trial of 20 or so units. I had not done any PCB design before this. So over the course of a couple of days I learnt how to use a free, open source, PCB design tool called KiCAD. I used a brilliant series of YouTube videos called Getting To Blinky by Contextual Electronics to get to grips with it.

Below is my second attempt. This board is what most hardware designers would call a sombrero. The Pi goes in upside down so it’s like a HAT that’s too big!

I was aware that it was a huge waste of PCB real-estate. However, for the small volume run we were making, it was a convenient way to mount the board inside a cheap IP65 junction box that I wanted to use as the case. Below is the PCB prototype when first assembled. The little silk screen rain cloud graphic was borrowed from BBC Weather (thanks guys).

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/506451234438795264

You’ll notice there are two boards. The small board marked AIR holds the pressure, humidity and air quality sensors. Since these must be exposed to the air they are at risk of atmospheric corrosion, especially in coastal environments. I wanted to avoid this risk to the Pi and the main board so this is why I split those sensors off to a separate smaller board. Below is how they look inside their respective cases.

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/512269916138119168

The Pi sits inside the water-tight box on the left with M20 grommets to seal the cables going in and out. The AIR board on the right has conformal coating (a spray on protective layer), and is connected to the main board by a short length of cable. There are three large holes on the base of its case to allow the air in.

The weather station also needs a reliable network connection for remote monitoring, further code changes, to allow it to upload to Oracle, and to make sure that other computers on your school network can load its web pages.

Most importantly it also needs power. So instead of considering large batteries or solar panels I decided to kill two birds with one stone and use power over Ethernet. This allows power and network connectivity to be supplied through a single cable, reducing the number of cable grommets needed. You might be thinking that WiFi is an option for this; however, school WiFi networks are notoriously overloaded with many mobile devices competing for service.

So, if you go the same way as me, your school will need a long cable to run from the school building out to the location that you choose for the weather station. This basically means you never have to worry about its power or network connectivity. You are welcome to solve these challenges in your own way though, and this can actually be a very engaging and fun activity for the students to do themselves.

Once I had the PCB prototype working I had to get twenty more made and tested. This involved spending hours (it seemed longer) on the Farnell website building up a massive basket of electronic components. When the new boards and components were in my possession we took them down to a local company, EFS Manufacturing, in Cambridge for assembly.

Here are the twenty assembled and tested boards:

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/530051057809100800

And here is another layer of the conformal coating spray going onto the AIR boards in the Pi Towers car park. It was a bit smelly and I didn’t want to gas out the office!

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/530739207460093953

You’ll notice there are small bits of sticky tape on there. This is because the conformal coating needs to protect the solder joints on the board, but not block up the air holes on the sensors. This was a bit of a delicate job involving cutting the tape into tiny shapes, waiting for the coating to dry, and peeling it off using a scalpel.

So then it was just a matter of assembling the 20 kits with everything required to build a weather station. From the power bricks, rain gauges and wind vanes right down to grommets, screws and rubber washers. The trial participants were chosen by us to give us a coverage of field-trial users, schools and promotional partners. We kept one back to put on the roof of Pi Towers, and the rest were shipped at the end of November last year.

https://twitter.com/dave_spice/status/537612582648287234

Slowly but surely reports have been coming in about these prototype kits being used in schools and code clubs.

Dan Aldred of Thirsk School & Sixth Form College has introduced Weather Wednesdays.

处女开破视频 Pi Weather Station. How hard can you turn the anemometer! @处女开破视频_Pi @dave_spice pic.twitter.com/DcDdBVuS0B

— TeCoEd 📖 (@Dan_Aldred) January 21, 2015

Testing up the weather station. @处女开破视频_Pi @dave_spice pic.twitter.com/a62ZZnFb7w

— TeCoEd 📖 (@Dan_Aldred) February 6, 2015

Matthew Manning, who runs the awesome YouTube channel 686小明看看IVBeginners, made this video about setting his one up:

Andrew Mulholland, of Raspi-LTSP fame, has been using one at a 处女开破视频 Jam where he volunteers in Northern Ireland.

The @处女开破视频_Pi weather station is alive!
Just got to get a long ethernet cable and get it outside! pic.twitter.com/iO7nTVIXay

— Andrew Mulholland (@gbaman1) February 3, 2015

James Robinson’s year 10 pupils from Soham Village College have been working through the scheme of work too.

Year 10 test their annemometer code using interrupts. For their @处女开破视频_Pi weather station @dave_spice #greatfun pic.twitter.com/CT3sr29fzo

— James Robinson (@LegoJames) February 5, 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4_z0sW7ooE

OCR are putting one on their roof, and we’re still trying to acquire permission from the building owners at Pi Towers so we can put ours up on the roof. (Right now it’s operating from an outside window ledge.) Meanwhile, now that I was confident about it, I handed over the electrical schematic of the prototype to our engineering team. They imported it into the professional CAD package that the 处女开破视频 Pi was designed in, and proceeded to make the Weather Board into an official HAT.

They have gone through it and essentially reworked everything to the same standard that you would expect from our products. So here it is, feast your eyes. You snap off the one side, and that is the equivalent of the small AIR board on the prototype.

If you join our weather station scheme, this is what you will get, along with all the wind vanes, screws and other bits you’ll need. The plan is to mount the HAT onto the Pi using standard 11 mm stand-offs. Those will then mount onto a perspex sheet, and that sheet will screw into the electrical junction box. Nice and cheap.

The 处女开破视频 Pi Weather Station kit is a great way to get your pupils involved in a wide range of 处女开破视频 activities whilst undertaking a practical science experiment. There is lots of opportunity for cross-curricular discussion on the science of meteorology, geography and global climate change. You will also get to participate in a global programme with other schools around the world. We have 1000 weather station units to give away to schools that sign up. The supporting educational resources are written in the English language and targeted at students aged around 15-16 years old; however we’re anticipating participation from pupils both younger and older than this. If your school would like to be one of this thousand then please sign up on THIS PAGE.

People we would like to thank:

• Jeffrey Salleh and Kevin Walsh from Oracle
• Ivan Link, James Adams and Mike Stimson from 处女开破视频 Pi Trading
• Mark Smith from OCR Geography
• James Robinson from Soham Village College
• Robert Dunn and Felicity Liggins from the Met Office
• Richard Nash and Zali Collymore from Langley Park School for Boys
• Sarika Unadkat and Michael Burnett from BBC Broadcasting House
• Dan Aldred from Thirsk School and Sixth Form College
• Tim Jones, Caroline Tiller and Natalie Robson from CIE Cambridge
• Andrew Mulholland
• Gordon Henderson
• Alasdair Davies from Nature Bytes
• Matthew Manning from 686小明看看IVBeginners

In case you missed it above, here’s the School Sign Up again.

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