Category: Teaching
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Thoughts on teaching programming with Minecraft and Python
Saturday saw the first dBsCode taster workshop, for budding programmers between 11 and 16. We set up 20 Raspberry Pi’s, which we networked together and used our new procedural Minecraft 3D shape primitives to build a number of projects in Python involving castles, spiders and an infinite house generator. Networking was very important – it…
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More procedural Minecraft architecture
More work on the Python teaching environment we’ll be using next week for the Minecraft workshop at dBsMusic. I’m working on various ideas for procedural architecture, using this as a way to demonstrate what programming is about – thinking procedurally/functionally. The code is online here – I’ll be adding some exercises and course materials over…
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Strange terraforming
Working on the upcoming Raspberry Pi programming workshop for dBsCode, I’m wrapping the Minecraft Python API with a functional style one to reduce the amount of syntax we’ll have to teach. The idea is to build complex 3D shapes via abstraction, out of simple primitives. The IDE we’re using is Geany which seems to run…
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Coding is Fun
West Cornwall’s CodeClub team (Glen Pike and I) bring you the next stage at dBs Music:
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Scratch -> Lego Mindstorms
A bit of hardware hacking for Troon Primary CodeClub, who have tons of old style Lego Mindstorms they don’t use any more, and after a year of Scratch programming on their PCs are just getting started with Raspberry Pi. We’re using this Scratch modification together with the hardware I’m making which is based on this…
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Many languages: Düsseldorf Institute for Music and Media Seminar
Last week was my first official seminar at the
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slub at Kunsthal Aarhus
Last week Alex and I took to the road on another slub mini-tour starting in Denmark at the Kunsthal Aarhus where we ran a livecoding workshop and performed at the opening of the Aarhus Filmfestival. The Kunsthal gallery was exhbiting “Systemics #2: As we may think (or, the next world library)” with work by Florian…
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Sonic Bike Hacklab Part 2: FM accelerometer transmissions
[Continued from part 1] On day one, after we introduced the project and the themes we wanted to explore, Ryan Jordan had a great idea of how to prototype the bike-bike communication using FM radio transmissions. He quickly freeform built a short range FM transmitter powered by a 9v battery. The next thing we needed…
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Sonic Bike Hacklab: Part 1
Time to report on the sonic bike hacklab Kaffe Matthews and I put on in AudRey HQ in Hackney. We had a sunny and stormy week of investigation into sonic bike technology. After producing three installations with sonic bikes, the purpose of the lab was to open the project up to more people with fresh…
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Slub at the Deershed festival
Deershed is a music festival designed to accommodate families with lots of activities for children. Part of this year’s festival was a Machines Tent, including Lego robot building, Mechano constructions, 3D printing and computer games. Slub’s daily routine in the Machines Tent started by setting up the Al Jazari gamepad livecoding installation, a couple of…