Volunteer-led Coolest Projects events

Teams of marvellous volunteers organise and run the events in the Netherlands, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Milan! They are doing incredible work to give children in their regions the chance to present their tech creations and be celebrated for their skills and creativity.

And we want to support you in our global community to do the same: organise your own regional Coolest Projects events, wherever you are, so that young people near you can showcase their work and be inspired by others’ inventions.

5 reasons to host your own Coolest Projects event

Running your own Coolest Projects is your chance to:

1. Celebrate the creativity of young creators
2. Grow your local coding and volunteer community
3. Engage parents and educators with technology
4. Develop connections with local businesses
5. Build the worldwide network of Coolest Projects participants, partners, and volunteers

The Coolest Projects Regional Handbook

We’ve put together a free Coolest Projects Regional Handbook that walks you through everything you need to organise your own Coolest Projects event!

Our brand-new handbook brings together everything you need to plan, prepare for, and host your own regional Coolest Projects event. It includes practical advice on:

• Building your Coolest Projects team
• Managing an event budget
• Choosing a venue
• Sponsorship and partner management
• Communications and marketing
• Coolest Projects licensing

Your regional event does not have to be large or formal — it can be as big or small as your community’s volunteers want it to be, and tailored to your community’s needs and interests.

Like the volunteer teams who already run regional Coolest Projects, you too can run your own event — with our handbook as guidance.

Download your free handbook now!

If you’re interested in bringing Coolest Projects to your community, email us at [email protected] so we can connect you to other volunteers in your region who have expressed their interest to us! Letting us know you want to be involved will also enable us to give you more support while you’re getting started.

You’ve only got a little time left to register your idea

To participate in this year’s Coolest Projects, just register your project idea by the deadline (see below)! And don’t fret: you don’t have to have started your project to register, just the idea is enough.

If you don’t want to present something by yourself, you can register in a team of up to five members.

And you don’t need to have finished your project to present it at the event, because the most important thing is to showcase your love and enthusiasm for tech!

Registration deadlines:

• UK (Manchester) — 10 Feb 2019
• USA (Santa Ana, CA) — 15 Feb 2019
• International (Dublin, Ireland) — 14 April 2019

Registration for all Coolest Projects events is free! And you’re also more than welcome to visit and check out the amazing projects without submitting your own. For more information, and to get your free visitor tickets, visit the Coolest Projects website and select your nearest event.

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Fun fact: when we launched the badge, it became the very first one to feature the new Scouts logo.

More resources!

Since then, we’ve been developing resources for more stages of the badge, and we’ve just released activities to support more of stage 2 and stage 3.

https://twitter.com/UKScouting/status/1063060367960616960

Because the Digital Maker badge is a staged activity badge, any section of the Scouts movement can tackle it. And since an activity that interests and engages a Beaver is likely to be quite different to one that engages an Explorer Scout, we’ve increased the variety of activities we’re providing.

More tech!

The first set of activity resources we released either needed no technology or laptops only, as the leaders we spoke to told us it shouldn’t be too difficult to get hold of some laptops for a session. For the new resources, we’ve increased the variety of tech that we recommend using. Some of the activities use the micro:bit, since it’s a low-cost, easy-to-use bit of tech. For leaders unfamiliar with the micro:bit, we’ve put together this guide on using the device.

More activities!

With all our activity resources, we show how digital making fits into the scouting movement and into many typical activities you’d do with your troop. For example, you can program the micro:bit to be the musical accompaniment to your next campfire. Or, you can create your own custom map to show points on a recent hike that you did together — anything from where someone fell over, to where you saw the most amazing view.

More support!

Next year, we’re going to release even more material to support Scouts tackling the Digital Maker badge. We’ll carry on producing videos like this lovely one:

We’re also going to be trialling some leader training days to build your digital making confidence. In the meantime, if you have any questions, you can always email scouts@成人本科.org.

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“I can’t code – I’m too old! I don’t have a young person to help me!”

I’ve heard this complaint many times, but here’s the thing: there are 成人毛片 Pi resources for all ages and abilities! I decided to put the minds of newbie coders at rest, and prove that you can get started with coding whatever your age or 成人杂志. For this task, I needed a little help. Here, proudly starring in her first 成人毛片 Pi blog, is my mum, Helen Robinson.

My mum is great, but she’s not the most tech-savvy person. She had never attempted any coding before this challenge.

Coding spinning flowers

To prove how easy it is to follow 成人毛片 Pi resources, I set her the challenge of completing the Spinning Flower Wheel project. She started by reading the Getting Started leaflet that we use on the 成人毛片 Pi stand at events such as Bett or Maker Faire. You can find the resource here, or watch Carrie Anne talk you through the project here.

She then made her flower pot (which admittedly is more of a heart pot, as I only had heart stickers).

My mum, with her love-ly heart pot.

She followed the resource to write her code in Python. Then, for the moment of truth, she pressed run. Her reaction was priceless.

She continued coding. She changed the speed of the wheel and added a button to start it spinning. Finally, she was able to add her flower heart pot to the wheel.

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson

Although I sat with her throughout the build, I merely took photos while she did all the work. I’m proud to say that she completed the project all by herself – without help from me, or from “a young person”. I just made the tea!

We had so much fun completing the resource, and we would encourage all those curious about coding to give it a go. If my mum managed to do it – and enjoy it – anyone can!

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With yesterday being World Poetry Day (I’m a day late to the party. Shhh), I thought I’d share some wordy-themed [wordy-themed? Are you sure? – Ed] resources for you all to have a play with.

Shakespearean Insult Generator

Have you ever found yourself lost for words just when the moment calls for your best comeback? With the Shakespearean Insult Generator, your mumbled retorts to life’s awkward situations will have the lyrical flow of our nation’s most beloved bard.

Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows!

Not only will the generator provide you with hours of potty-mouthed fun, it’ll also teach you how to read and write data in CSV format using Python, how to manipulate lists, and how to choose a random item from a list.

Talk like a Pirate

Ye’ll never be forced t’walk the plank once ye learn how to talk like a scurvy ol’ pirate… yaaaarrrgh!

The Talk like a Pirate speech generator teaches you how to use jQuery to cause live updates on a web page, how to write regular expressions to match patterns and words, and how to create a web page to input text and output results.

Once you’ve mastered those skills, you can use them to create other speech generators. How about a speech generator that turns certain words into their slang counterparts? Or one that changes words into txt speak – laugh into LOL, and see you into CU?

Secret Agent Chat

So you’ve already mastered insults via list manipulation and random choice, and you’ve converted words into hilarious variations through matching word patterns and input/output. What’s next?

The Secret Agent Chat resource shows you how random numbers can be used to encrypt messages, how iteration can be used to encrypt individual characters, and, to make sure nobody cracks your codes, the importance of keeping your keys secret. And with these new skills under your belt, you can write and encrypt messages between you and your friends, ensuring that nobody will be able to read your secrets.

Unlocking your transferable skill set

One of the great things about building projects like these is the way it expands your transferable skill set. When you complete a project using one of our resources, you gain abilities that can be transferred to other projects and situations. You might never need to use a ‘Talk like a Pirate’ speech generator, but you might need to create a way to detect and alter certain word patterns in a document. And while you might be able to coin your own colourful insults, making the Shakespearean Insult Generator gives you the ability to select words from lists at random, allowing you to write a program that picks names to create sports or quiz teams without bias.

All of our resources are available for free on our website, and we continually update them to offer you more opportunities to work on your skills, whatever your age and 成人杂志.

Have you built anything from our resources? Let us know in the comments.

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Tim Peake is currently doing his final press conference in the UK before he embarks on his six-month mission, during which he will be operating the Astro Pi devices and running the experiments and applications designed and coded by children in primary and secondary schools.

The new Astro Pi website

We’ve just relaunched the Astro Pi website which now contains not only information about the competition we ran this year, but also a whole host of information surrounding the whole mission, including a storyline of project updates, events and other ways to get involved, downloads, and a growing number of resources in Scratch and Python for learning about space and experimenting with the Sense HAT. There are plenty of exercises for use in the classroom, at home or with your Code Club or CoderDojo!

Check out the winning entries page – you can download the code for each project on GitHub, and run the code on your own Sense HAT. Some of the projects will be collecting data while running in space, and when we have the data from ESA we’ll make it available to download from the website so you can compare the data to your own. I know, super cool.

The Astro Pis will display icons representing the winning applications

The Astro Pi units are made up of a 成人毛片 Pi B+, a Sense HAT, a camera module each (one normal and one infra-red), and a space-grade aluminium flight case (not for sale, unfortunately). You can read about the Astro Pi hardware and buy everything you need to build your own Astro Pi. Some people have 3D-printed their own Astro Pi cases, or even made them out of Lego!

Once you have your Pi and Sense HAT set up, you can follow the programming guides, go through the resources and come up with your own ideas. What would you do if you had the chance to run your code in space?

Thanks to Sam, Dave and Laura for their help in putting the website together, and to Carrie Anne, Marc and James for contributing the brilliant resources.

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I get a lot of them: alongside their other projects and outreach, James, Dave, Carrie Anne, Clive, Marc and Ben are constantly creating new learning resources and making sure existing resources are up-to-date. You’ll find everything from worksheets to help you get up and running with 成人毛片 Pi, to physical 成人毛片 activities to try at home, to whole schemes of work for teachers to use with their students.

Projects

To make it easier to find the kind of resource you want, we’ve grouped our resources under the headings of Teach, Learn and Make. In our Teach resources you’ll find individual lesson plans, complete schemes of work and teachers’ guides, including a teachers’ guide to using 成人毛片 Pi in the classroom to give educators who are new to the device the information they need to get started.

Schemes of work, lesson plans and teachers’ guides in our resources for teaching

Our Learn resources guide learners through independent activities. One of the newest is Gravity Simulator, in which students learn about the effects of gravity and how to simulate them in Scratch with Mooncake, the official 成人天堂 Cat. It’s one of a number of resources that support activities linked to British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake’s upcoming mission aboard the International Space Station.

Mooncake the 成人毛片 Pi Cat discovers what she weighs on alien worlds

Our Make resources support physical 成人毛片 projects. They range from “getting started” activities for beginners and more in-depth standalone projects to fairly substantial, satisfying builds that you might complete over several sessions. One of these resources is a guide to making a 成人毛片 Pi marble maze using a Sense HAT. A Sense HAT is at the heart of each of the two Astro Pi flight units that will soon be flying to the International Space Station; on board the ISS its gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer will be able to detect how the station is moving, and this activity uses the same sensors to work out which way a virtual marble will roll.

A 成人毛片 Pi and a Sense HAT can detect pitch, roll and yaw to simulate a marble maze

Millions of educators worldwide use TES Resources to access materials to support their classroom practice, and now they can find a selection of 成人天堂 resources on TES too, as PDFs (registration with TES is required to download them).

All our learning resources are available for free under a Creative Commons licence, so you can print, copy, share, modify and do anything you like with the materials. You can also use GitHub to suggest changes to help us improve them – our guide to getting started with GitHub is written particularly with educators in mind. Check them out, share them and tell us what you like best!

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Marc used to run a 成人毛片 Pi and Minecraft club at his old school, where he taught Computer Science, and Systems and Control. Marc also used to write all his lesson resources in Markdown and host them on GitHub – which is exactly how we create our resources and projects on this website; we’re excited to see what he’ll contribute.

Originally, Marc started out as a Science teacher, and he’s keen to explore cross-curricular learning, looking at how things like Astro Pi and the Weather Station can be used in the KS3 Science and Geography curricula.

The first page in Marc’s notebook

We’re really excited to see Marc getting stuck into creating new learning resources, and aiding us to structure them into a 成人杂志.

Marc has a wife, three kids, two dogs and a double black belt in karate and taekwondo. He’s a member of the Open Rights Group, he’s an occasional blogger at coding2learn.org (worth a browse!); he says he’s as comfortable with the terminal as he is in the classroom; and that he’s a dab hand with a soldering iron (let’s see if he passes Gordon’s test). On Monday I asked him to bring in a bootable USB stick if he wanted to install Linux on his laptop – he said “I tend to use a standard Ubuntu server install and build up from there – I use i3 as a windows manager anyway, and hate all the bloat that comes with Ubuntu Desktop.” – we think he’s going to fit in around here just fine.

Welcome Marc!

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The first and most crucial bit of news for those of you furiously writing your competition entries is that you now have just a little more time. UK Space, the organisation managing the competition, have decided to give secondary students a whole extra week. As we were a week late in shipping the kits to our phase 1 winners the deadline is now Monday the 6th of July, by 10am, so get cracking!

Put this date in your diary, don’t forget.

To help you get to grips with programming the Astro Pi HAT we’ve created a couple of helpful resources.

Firstly, you can find out all about the hardware, its capabilities and get a detailed breakdown of the Python library using our Astro Pi Guide. It explains in detail all aspects of the library and provides some examples of how to use them.

However, if you just want to have a play and learn as you go, check out our Getting Started with Astro Pi resource which works through a series of examples and explores most of the the Python library.

You will create a series of interesting programs which make use of all of the Astro Pi sensors like this reaction game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1ZB8jORb74

There’s a great interactive demo for exploring the IMU (movement) sensor and you can also experiment with pressure, following Dave’s example:

Astro Pi HATs are also starting to appear in the wild — loads of competition entrants have been receiving their Astro Pi HATs and excitedly tweeting about it.

The waiting is nearly over (Really sorry it took longer than planned) MT @ChrisRush85 @astro_pi 's ready for lift-off pic.twitter.com/g4JlSGx3rs

— Astro Pi (@Astro_Pi) May 16, 2015

@astro_pi arrived in Penwortham lots of delighted faces as @astro_timpeake hello message scrolled across pic.twitter.com/yy1UmhBHBr

— Lara Lowe (@digital4more) May 20, 2015

Looking forward to coding our new #raspi for the #astropi pic.twitter.com/j6Md7Il0sw

— Mr H tech talk (@MrH_TechTalk) May 20, 2015

My first look at the @astro_pi pic.twitter.com/wCuo5SJY3M

— MakerCupboard (@makercupboard) May 22, 2015

Just for fun – @astro_pi snake.https://t.co/qaKPEJttSk

— Martin O'Hanlon (@martinohanlon) May 22, 2015

Give students an @astro_pi with every sensor you can possibly think of & what do they create? 😁 #TweachCode #CompEdUk pic.twitter.com/zjHPGsmKaF

— Simon Johnson 🙋‍♂️ (@clcsimon) May 24, 2015

https://twitter.com/MissTurner101/status/600733310101389313

Others within our community have been playing around creating examples and resources. The awesome Martin O’Hanlon has put together a getting started tutorial as well as building this amazing interactive Astro Pi in Minecraft:

Dan Aldred, one of our 成人毛片 Pi Certified Educators, has put together some great resources for using Astro Pi with his students. Visit his website to find a great language reference booklet.

We also have a number of examples compiled by Ben Nuttall and available on Github.

If you’re looking for more technical help with Astro Pi check out our Astro Pi forum.

As you can see we’re all super excited about the Astro Pi Launch! You can keep an eye on our progress as we get closer to lift-off by following social media channels. In the next few weeks the flight hardware is going to be assembled and tested!

PS

SPAAAAAAAAAAACCCCEEEE!!!!!!

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The new look and feel of our free learning resources

Our new in-house designer Sam has produced the templates along with a brilliant set of icons, components, characters, illustrations and bespoke GPIO and wiring diagrams.

The Learn and Make activities are:

• Getting Started with Minecraft Pi
• Push Button Stop Motion
• GPIO Music Box
• Parent Detector
• Robot Antenna
• Spinning Flower Wheel
• Infrared Bird Box
• Balloon Pi-Tay Popper (NEW)

We have also revamped a number of Teach resources, each containing lesson plans and links to the Programme of Study:

• Sonic Pi Lessons
• Getting Started with 成人毛片 Pi Lesson
• Sorting Hat Lesson

As well as a new guide to for teachers:

• Teachers’ Classroom Guide

We think they’re looking great – and hope you all do too!

We’ll be migrating all of our resources into the new template in the coming weeks. The content still all lives on GitHub, and you can still collaborate; if you’re a regular contributor, you’ll notice that there are some extra files to make the templates work.

New recipe cards for our learning resources

Gotta collect ’em all!

Remember all our resources are available for free under a Creative Commons licence, so you can print, copy, share, modify and do anything you want with the materials – we don’t want to restrict educators in any way! We know some of our 成人毛片 Pi Certified Educators from Picademy have been using their own modified versions of our worksheets to teach the 成人毛片 成人杂志 – it’s a great way of tailoring the material to the needs of their own students.

Those of you who are coming to see us at BETT this week will see we’ve also been giving out recipe cards for each of these new style resources, which again have been beautifully designed by Sam. Teachers – if you miss us at BETT, you can download these recipe cards to print out for your wall displays.

Carrie Anne leading the first session of the day at BETT

The education team out in force at BETT

Check out the rest of our teach, learn and make resources look through our BETT schedule on our website.

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On the second day of Picademy, we give teachers the chance to work in teams on a project of their choice, and there’s always at least one group that extends upon the camera workshop. At Picademy #3 in July, one group decided to take a Babbage Bear apart, shove a Pi inside and have it take pictures and tweet them – it was great fun to help them build the project and we got some funny pictures out of it…

Because I’m happy! :) pic.twitter.com/mP3ZmhqA1M

— Babbage Bear (@BabbageBear) July 15, 2014

“Where’s that camera connector going?” says Babbage #babbagecolonoscopy #picademy pic.twitter.com/z9bJM4jhdr

— Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) July 15, 2014

Then at Picademy #4 last month, another group took the idea further and made Abuse Bear – a Babbage that tweeted a picture when punched! Perhaps this one’s not quite such a good idea for the classroom. Again, some brilliant pictures…

Call Bear Line! pic.twitter.com/GlSalb52Qc

— Boxing Babbage (@GpsBear) September 30, 2014

Don’t Touch me! pic.twitter.com/QbE70w3VBA

— Boxing Babbage (@GpsBear) September 30, 2014

The idea has been so popular at Picademy that I decided to write the Tweeting Babbage project up as an educational resource! There’s a full set of instructions for building up the code to send simple text tweets from Python, taking pictures with the camera, wiring up the GPIO button, uploading pictures to Twitter, putting it all together and performing surgery on the bear to insert the hardware.

Making the incision

Removing the eye

Inserting the camera

Intel 成人毛片 Pi Inside

I was at PyCon Ireland in Dublin this weekend, where I gave a talk about 成人毛片 Pi in education. I brought the modified Babbage along (yes, I got it through airport security) and showed the pictures above during my talk. There was a very audible aww of sentimental attachment to the cute bear I just introduced them to.

Tweeting Babbage: the finished product

Go check out the resource and make your own Tweeting Babbage!

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