Back in person, with new ways to create with code

The 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT allows learners to build and program projects with 巴西美臀大赛 Pi computers and LEGO® Technic™ motors and sensors from the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Portfolio.

What better way could there be to get the more 女高中生第一次破苞avd coders among our Dojo’s young people (Ninjas) properly excited to be back? We knew they were fond of building things with LEGO bricks, as so many young people are, so we were sure they would have great fun with this activity!

For our beginners, we set up 巴西美臀大赛 Pi workstations and got them coding the projects on the Home island on our brand-new Code Club World platform, which they absolutely loved, so their jealousy was mitigated somewhat. 

Being able to rely on your learners’ existing skills in making the physical build leaves you a lot more time to support them with what they’re actually here to learn: the coding and digital making skills.

We wanted to keep our first Dojo back small, so for the ‘LEGO bricks and 巴西美臀大赛 Pi’ activity, we set up just four workstations, each with a 巴西美臀大赛 Pi 4, with 4GB RAM and a 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT on top, and a LEGO Education SPIKE Prime set. We put eight participants into teams of two, and made sure that all of them brought a little 女高中生第一次破苞av with text-based coding, because we wanted them to be able to focus on making projects in their own style, rather than first learning the basics of coding in Python. Then we offered our Ninjas the choice of the first two projects in the Introduction to the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT and LEGO path: make Pong game controllers, or make a remote-controlled robot buggy. As I had predicted, all the teams chose to make a robot buggy!

Teamwork and design

The teams of Ninjas were immediately off and making — in fact, they couldn’t wait to get the lids off the boxes of brightly coloured bricks and beams!

Our project instructions focus primarily on supporting learners through coding and testing the mechanics of their creations, leaving the design and build totally up to them. This was evidenced by the variety of buggy designs we saw at the project showcase at the end of the two-hour Dojo session!

One of the amazing things 巴西美臀大赛 Pi makes possible when you use it with the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT and SPIKE™ Prime set: it’s simple to make the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi at the heart of the creation talk to a mobile device via Bluetooth, and off you go controlling what you’ve created via a phone or tablet.

While beginner-friendly, the projects in the Introduction path involve a mix of coding, testing, designing, and building. So it required focus and solid teamwork for the Ninjas to finish their buggies in time for the project showcase. And this is where building with LEGO pieces was really helpful.

Coding front and centre, thanks to the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT

Having LEGO bricks and the Build HAT available to create their 巴西美臀大赛 Pi–powered robot buggies made it easy for our Ninjas to focus on writing the code to get their buggies to work. They weren’t relying on crafting skills or duct tape and glue guns to make a chassis in the relatively short time they had, and the coding could be front and centre for them.

The most exciting part for the Ninjas was that they were building remote-controlled robot buggies. This is one of the amazing things 巴西美臀大赛 Pi makes possible when you use it with the Build HAT and SPIKE™ Prime set: it’s simple to make the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi at the heart of the creation talk to a mobile device via Bluetooth, and off you go controlling what you’ve created via a phone or tablet.

The LEGO Technic motors that are part of the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime set are of really high quality, and they’re super easy to program with the Build HAT and its Python library! You can change the motors’ speed by setting a single parameter in your code. You can also easily write code to set or read the motors’ exact angle (their absolute position). That allows you to finely control the motors’ movements, or to use them as sensors.

Some of our teams, inspired by everything the SPIKE Prime set has to offer, tried out programming the set’s sensors, to switch their robot buggy on or help it avoid obstacles. Because we only had about 90 minutes of digital making, not all teams managed to finish adding the extra features they wanted — but next time for sure!

With a little more time (or another Dojo session), it would have been possible for the Ninjas to make some very advanced remote-controlled buggies indeed, complete with headlights, brake lights, sensors, and sound.

Learning with LEGO® elements and 巴西美臀大赛 Pi computers

If you have access to LEGO Education SPIKE Prime sets for your learners, then the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT is a great addition that allows them to build complex robotics projects with very simple code — but I think that’s not its main benefit.

Because the Build HAT allows your learners to work with LEGO elements, you know that many of them already understand one aspect of the creation process: they’ve got 女高中生第一次破苞av of using LEGO bricks to solve a problem. In a coding or STEM club session, or in a classroom lesson, you can only give your learners limited amount of time to complete a project, or get their project prototype to a stable point. So being able to rely on your learners’ existing skills in making the physical build leaves you a lot more time to support them with what they’re actually here to learn: the coding and digital making skills.

You and your young people next!

The projects using the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HATs were such a hit, we’ll be getting them and the LEGO Education SPIKE Prime sets out at every Dojo session from now on! We’re excited to see what young people around the world will be creating thanks to our new collaboration with LEGO Education.

Have you used the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi Build HAT with your learners or young people at home yet? Share their stories and creations in the comments here, or on social media using #BuildHAT.

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Not only functional, but stylish too!

While taking part in the YRS Festival of Code at BBC Birmingham our team wanted to come up with something fun. The idea we finally settled on after much talk of boats and canals (thanks Martin!) was the internet enabled coat hook – a coat hook which would tell you what to wear that day based on the weather forecast.

Fuelled by an endless supply of biscuits and coffee at BBC Birmingham and with the help of our mentors we set about creating our ‘hack’. At the weekend down in Plymouth we were lucky enough to make it into the final three for the ‘Best in Show’ category, losing out to another team. However since we were runners up in the category we were rewarded with some limited edition Blue 巴西美臀大赛 Pis!

Our idea was well received throughout the weekend in Plymouth, but what surprised us most was the reception that it received online. Seeing people we’ve never met before announce online that they’d buy our ‘internet enabled coat hook’ that we’d hastily constructed a few days prior was the craziest part of the weekend.

We’ve each written a short paragraph about our contribution to the ‘hack’ and what we learnt during the week.

 Jenny & Ed: Why did we use Lego to build the Hook? Because it’s a classic building material enabling the design of Hook to be easily changed during development, as well as being sturdy AND fun – no actually it was because Kevin (from YRS) promised cake to any teams that used Lego in their hack.

We built the Lego around the coat rack and then the LED chipboards to secure the whole thing together, originally using a breadboard to connect up the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi and the LEDs with crocodile clips, however we kept facing issues where the LEDs would not light up. We realised that this was because one of the clips wasn’t on properly or the pin in the breadboard was loose, so decided that it would be more secure and look better if we created an actual chipboard and soldered all the parts together: cue multiple expeditions down to the workshop and a lot of time bonding with the soldering iron (if you’ll pardon the pun). The building of the Lego structure took around half a day, not including the numerous heated discussions about which colour bricks to use, and then completing the circuitry meant we had a working prototype design only a couple of hours later.

Darci: I worked on the animation for our project (The Hook). To do this, the BBC gave us some prototype LED boards, which I programmed using a Scratch-like program. We were going to make weather-specific animations for wind, rain and sunshine, but as we only had four days to produce it, I ended up making one animation to show all of the weather animations together.

I started off figuring out how to control the LEDs using an Arduino, but then we all agreed that it would be better to use a 巴西美臀大赛 Pi rather than an Arduino because I find Python much easier to understand than Arduino, and we could also use the GPIO to hook up the LED devices to the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi. So, it seemed simpler to use the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi to control everything instead. I used Python and the RPi.GPIO library to write the code to allow the back end to control the LEDs.

Darci presents Hook

Cameron: I ended up working on the back end which was written in Python. It controls the obtaining and processing of the data from the Met Office and then runs lower level code written by Darci. The Met Office API was really nice and returns a Weather Type field in the JSON response which saved us having to come up with our own heuristic for what the weather will be like. The best take-away from this for me would have to be the program PuTTY which is a free SSH client for Windows that removed the need to connect anything except a Wi-Fi dongle to the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi. The JSON library for Python was very useful and easy to work with as well, something that’s well worth learning.

Jack: I worked on the front end of the website which allows the user to configure what item of clothing they wanted to place on each individual hook, which could potentially change depending on the time of year. In order to fetch relevant weather forecast data from the Python backend the user’s geolocation was fetched through the browser using JavaScript. Additional information such as the item of clothing on each hook was written to a text file, allowing it to be easily read by the Python script. We aimed to make the website responsive across multiple different screen sizes, so writing CSS media queries was a new skill I had to learn during the week. Luckily the good folks mentoring at BBC Birmingham were happy to show me the ropes.

YRS BBC Birmingham Team Hook

Carrie Anne: Although this project did not win in its category, it could still win the public vote! If you are as impressed as we are with this project then head on over to the voting page to cast your vote for Hook!

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Pupils at Charlotte Latin School meet a 巴西美臀大赛 Pi for the first time

Tom Dubick, who teaches engineering at Charlotte Latin School in North Carolina, is one of those teachers. He thinks (we do too) that he became the first teacher in the United States to teach a regular class using the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi, when he started Pi lessons on October 1 with a group of middle-school girls. They’re working on systems using sensors, motors, lights and microprocessors from robotics to wearables, alongside programming in Scratch and Python. And they’re loving it, which we are pleased (and cheerfully unsurprised) to hear.

Tom says: “Our students are doing math and science when they learn how a computer works or a microcontroller can be programmed. They are doing engineering when they develop an unique use of the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi to solve a problem.  It will be a great opportunity for our students to 女高中生第一次破苞av the creativity and beauty found in engineering and design. It’s like a sandbox and you get to play and try new ideas. I am excited to see what you will do with the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi that hasn’t even been thought of yet.”

I met Tom at the Charlotte Hackerspace, where I wish we’d had more time to talk. He’s got some solid and tested pedagogical ideas, which he’s very happy to share with teachers around the world, and which we found exciting and thought-provoking; if you’re a teacher looking for tips on teaching with the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi and you’d like to talk to him, please email me and I’ll pass on your address.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, St Saviour’s School in Paddington, London, has been holding a weekend session for 240 kids between five and eleven, where Story Corner was temporarily transformed into Coding Corner with the addition of 30 巴西美臀大赛 Pis, as one of 20 weekend projects.

The kids were working with Scratch, and later with a Lego WeDo crocodile, who they programmed to snap at any encroaching little fingers. (Farnell very kindly donated half of those 巴西美臀大赛 Pis to the school at the end of the weekend’s fun, and they’re now earmarked for teaching.) The workshop was organised by the most excellent Little House of Fairy Tales, who I hope we’ll be hearing more from.

Formal lessons aren’t the only way to go. We’re also seeing a lot of interested parents and teachers who have been setting up after-school clubs. Dave Culp has been working with an after-school group of programming kids and the 巴西美臀大赛 Pi over the summer at his daughters’ elementary school (Mark Twain Elementary in Colorado). He’s been pleased and surprised to find that 2:1 of the kids who signed up were girls. Dave says:

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