What we have been up to last year and aiming for this year:
Albert:
I am beginning a new after school computing club at my kids school.
Last year it was all the Code Club course 1 content using Scratch and the kids loved it and you could see some of them found it interesting and fun. So, this year the plan is to be a bit more adventurous and introduce physical computing using Arduino.
At the Hackspace on the 9th Jan 2014 I designed a small circuit with 3 LEDs, 2 buttons and a piezo buzzer and created demonstration code showing all the LEDS flashing together, then when a button is pressed they do a chasing sequence and when the button is pressed again it plays a tune. With just this demo the children (11-12) will learn about for variables, for loops, while looks and if statements.
I needed to do it last night as only the afternoon before did the teacher coordinating the after school club agree to meet to at 12:15 on the 10th Jan.
Amazing how much you forget and out of practice the brain gets on coding and wiring when not used.
This year I plan to blog how each session of the club goes and so the hackspace will feature heavily as I expect most of the work I do for the club will be on Thursday evening.
Andrew Patience