coder dojo (4 out of 4)

Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire

☑ Attending!

Event website

Had an amazing time supporting the Prewired table at the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire on Sunday. I printed a load of flyers and posters, and helped haul laptops and lego, but then the kids did all the work. I was so impressed with how they pitched and demo'd their projects, told parents and kids all about Prewired, and generally enthused. I felt pretty safe sitting back and knowing they had things covered.

• Andrew (age 10) showed his webcam/gesture-controlled Scratch bubble-bursting game.
• Albie (age 9) demoed iPad app Wormy Drawing (which is in the app store with over 1k downloads!)
• Harry and Kiran (age 10) showed their fish-eating, physics-heavy Scratch game.
• Marley (age 13) brought his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm, that moves around and picks things up in response to commandline short codes, or a Wii remote.
• Sean and Toby (age 12) showed their Arduino model bus, which uses an ultrasound sensor to prevent accidents involving low bridges.
• Adam (age 8) showed his Scratch pong game.

(ages approximate, I'm pretty bad at figuring them out..)

TODO: photos! (but also see @Prewired).

Also massive thanks to Eder, Cameron and Harry who stuck it out all day and helped with carrying, setting up and demo-ing hardware, and Martha and Rikki who came for the last few hours (after most of the kids had left) and helped with take-down. These people are awesome.

RSVP

Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire

Had an amazing time supporting the Prewired table at the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire on Sunday. I printed a load of flyers and posters, and helped haul laptops and lego, but then the kids did all the work. I was so impressed with how they pitched and demo'd their projects, told parents and kids all about Prewired, and generally enthused. I felt pretty safe sitting back and knowing they had things covered.

• Andrew (age 10) showed his webcam/gesture-controlled Scratch bubble-bursting game.
• Albie (age 9) demoed iPad app Wormy Drawing (which is in the app store with over 1k downloads!)
• Harry and Kiran (age 10) showed their fish-eating, physics-heavy Scratch game.
• Marley (age 13) brought his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm, that moves around and picks things up in response to commandline short codes, or a Wii remote.
• Sean and Toby (age 12) showed their Arduino model bus, which uses an ultrasound sensor to prevent accidents involving low bridges.
• Adam (age 8) showed his Scratch pong game.

(ages approximate, I'm pretty bad at figuring them out..)

TODO: photos! (but also see @Prewired).

Also massive thanks to Eder, Cameron and Harry who stuck it out all day and helped with carrying, setting up and demo-ing hardware, and Martha and Rikki who came for the last few hours (after most of the kids had left) and helped with take-down. These people are awesome.

Tue 21 Apr 2015 2:21am (+00:00)

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Prewired Maker Week

☑ Attending!

Event website

During the second week of the easter holidays, we hold Prewired every day! Also known as the Maker Week, from 12 til 4 dedicated mentors hang out in CodeBase and help the kids with projects. Some kids come for just a few days, and some for the whole week. They can work on whatever they like; some carry on with what they do at regular Prewired sessions, some start a new project that they aim to finish that week, and others choose to learn something totally new.

On the first day we had over 20 kids; on subsequent days it dropped down to 10-15 because lots of schools were starting back this week.

Here's a rundown:

• Marley worked on his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm. I think he also did some general C++ and Python hacking.
• Jonas, [Joe]((http://pages.prewired.org/joe) and Cerys launched their first ever websites (and learned how to use FTP in the process)!
• Toby and Sean built an model bus using Arduino and an ultrasound sensor, aimed at prevent low-bridge related accidents.
• Mark worked on his Android game in Unity. He also modded Prison Architect and put together a spreadsheet to manage people's Minecraft mods on his server.
• Malcolm worked on setting up and tinkering with his own Minecraft server.
• Dan, Robert and Bob worked together to create a suite of tools for teaching people HTML/CSS and Java, across a website and an Android app.
• Harry started learning Java with tutorials, and worked on improving one of his Scratch games.
• Connor and Oli played with the Twitter streaming API.
• Albie ported his iPad drawing app to Scratch, and made some Scratch animations.

Mega props to mentors for helping out over the course of the week: Nantas, Freda, Eder, Luke, Helen, Cameron and Rikki (who came on his birthday!).

RSVP

Prewired Maker Week

During the second week of the easter holidays, we hold Prewired every day! Also known as the Maker Week, from 12 til 4 dedicated mentors hang out in CodeBase and help the kids with projects. Some kids come for just a few days, and some for the whole week. They can work on whatever they like; some carry on with what they do at regular Prewired sessions, some start a new project that they aim to finish that week, and others choose to learn something totally new.

On the first day we had over 20 kids; on subsequent days it dropped down to 10-15 because lots of schools were starting back this week.

Here's a rundown:

• Marley worked on his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm. I think he also did some general C++ and Python hacking.
• Jonas, [Joe]((http://pages.prewired.org/joe) and Cerys launched their first ever websites (and learned how to use FTP in the process)!
• Toby and Sean built an model bus using Arduino and an ultrasound sensor, aimed at prevent low-bridge related accidents.
• Mark worked on his Android game in Unity. He also modded Prison Architect and put together a spreadsheet to manage people's Minecraft mods on his server.
• Malcolm worked on setting up and tinkering with his own Minecraft server.
• Dan, Robert and Bob worked together to create a suite of tools for teaching people HTML/CSS and Java, across a website and an Android app.
• Harry started learning Java with tutorials, and worked on improving one of his Scratch games.
• Connor and Oli played with the Twitter streaming API.
• Albie ported his iPad drawing app to Scratch, and made some Scratch animations.

Mega props to mentors for helping out over the course of the week: Nantas, Freda, Eder, Luke, Helen, Cameron and Rikki (who came on his birthday!).

Sat 18 Apr 2015 1:24pm (+00:00)

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The Launch of Prewired

Several weeks of debating and planning following Young Rewired State finally came to fruition on the 16th of October, with our first Prewired event.

Thirty eight kidsyoung people arrived between 9:30 and 10 on that Wednesday morning (it was half term week in Scotland, so we weren't pulling them out of school), grabbed some kindly donated Google swag, made name badges with stickers and felt-tipped pens, and sat down for two and a half hours of lightly guided learning.



They were between the ages of three and eighteen, although the three to six year olds were more there to be tagging along with older siblings or University staff. It's obviously impossible to divide attendees up by age and decide what to work with them on, as older definitely does not mean more experienced. We had decided on no lower bound for the age limit, and no lower bound for experience either, figuring that the only real requirement is enthusiasm about programming. There was a huge mix of interests and abilities, and we let them decide for themselves which topics would be worth listening to.

We also had about fifteen students, University staff or industry professionals along as mentors.

After a few minutes of welcomes, where most of the room were willing to introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to learn ("Python", "Scratch" and "more about programming in general" were popular ones) we kicked off with three five minute introductions: to HTML and CSS (beginner), to HTML5 Geolocation (intermediate) and to Python's Natural Language Toolkit (advanced). They then had the chance to spend 40 minutes in a hands-on session for whichever of these they chose. The groups were very evenly spread, and despite a few hiccups with Python installations on Windows and Chrome not playing nice with geolocation (worked through thanks largely to the mentors) most people got some code up and running and appropriately hacked about with by the end.



We took a break for juice, crisps, chocolate and fruit, plus a bit of hardware tinkering. We'd borrowed a Nodecopter, but hadn't managed to get it charged in time so it wasn't in the air, but there were still plenty of people interested in looking at the code to control it. We also had a demo of a robot arm, which could be controlled by an Android app connected to a Python server, which had been written over the summer by one of our mentors.





Next up were three more lightning talks: introduction to Scratch (beginner), doing cool things with Redstone Circuits in Minecraft (intermediate) and introduction to PyGame (intermediate-advanced). The following hands-on session for Scratch was under-attended, possibly ousted by the allure of Minecraft, but the PyGame session had over a third of the group and made some great progress, which was awesome.

We finished a little late, but still managed to have time for a quick demo of a football playing robot from the nearby robotics lab, and a few attendees who took their time dragging themselves away from their screens.



I'm told that overall it was a success. I was concerned because I was generally called upon when something was going wrong, so my perspectively was weighted towards the negative. But it wasn't too chaotic, none of the
kidsattendees played up, and as far as we could tell they were doing something in some way productive at all times.

A lot of them had had little to no programming experience before that morning, and I really hope they were able to take away something positive and, most importantly, feel encouraged to try things out by themselves at home. Plenty, too, had enough experience that they were calling out to correct the speakers, and helping their peers to get things working. It's a huge challenge to find enough activities to engage so many different levels of experience and interest, and I don't think we did a bad job.

Our next Prewired event will be on the 30th of October, and we're running them bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from now on. They will be henceforth less structured. Our primary aim is to help young people to realise that with programming (and related areas) they can create anything, express themselves, and change the world. We don't wish to enforce a curriculum, but encourage them to explore areas they are interested in, learn how to teach themselves and figure out how to make what they want, and most of all to persuade them not to be afraid to experiment - to hack - and to just keep trying if it doesn't work first time. To get them excited before they become jaded and before this society's stereotypes have a chance to impact on them.

You can find out more about Prewired at prewired.org, and join the mailing list there too.

Photos and feedback

Here are some of the photos from the day:

If you took some that you'd like us to add, then please send them to hello@prewired.org!

Similarly, send any feedback you have about the event to us that way, as well.

Resources

I'll update this post (as well as the website) with resources from the speakers and mentors as I get hold of them.

Beginning HTML and CSS:

• A handy tool for demo-ing your code directly in the browser
• Code and cheatsheet from slides

HTML5 Geolocation:

• Code examples
• All you could need to know
• The Google Maps API

Building a chatbot with Python's Natural Language Toolkit:

• Installing NLTK
• How to

Intro to Scratch:

• Make Scratch programs here
• Video tutorials

Minecraft Redstone Circuits:

• Some tutorials

Intro to PyGame:

• Coming soon...

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Fri 18th of October 2013 at 2:16pm (Z)

Last modified: Fri 18th of October 2013 at 3:40pm (Z)

Co-founder and organiser, Prewired

Programming club for under 19s

Now weekly. Sometimes more. See prewired.org.

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Sun 1st of September 2013 at 9:00am (+01:00)