Tag: algorithmic literacy
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Red King: Host/Parasite co-evolution citizen science
A new project begins, on the subject of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. This one is a little different from a lot of Foam Kernow’s citizen science projects in that the subject is theoretical research – and involves mathematical simulations of populations of co-evolving organisms, rather than the direct study of real ones in…
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Training teachers in coding, and thinking about e-waste/recycled robots
We recently had the second inset training day in programming related activities at Truro school. Following on from the previous session I didn’t want to introduce too much new stuff, so we concentrated on going back over Sonic Pi and Minecraft/Python programming in the morning, then discussed a lot more about our future workshops in…
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Picademy Exeter and Future Thinking for Social Living
Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and…
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Easter Python/Minecraft programming day at dbsCode
Thursday saw our second dbsCode Easter programming taster, and like last year we focused on minecraft programming with our procedural architecture api. The main change this time was that for the 20 11-16 year old participants we doubled our teachers to 4 (Glen Pike, Francesca Sargent and Matthew Dodkins and me), plus a couple of…
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Training teachers in coding at Truro School
I’m part of a UK Department of Education funded project to join up 10 primary schools in Cornwall and get them programming. The teachers are very important people in this equation, so our first activity was a training day for them. The idea of this was to get them familiar with using the Raspberry Pi…
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dBsCode summer school
At the end of July I helped out with the dbscode summer school. The idea of this two week course was to encourage algorithmic literacy, with focus on employment – agile methods and test driven development (TDD), and aiming at people about to enter, or re-enter employment rather than the teenagers we focused on in…
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Why teach Kids Coding? (Royal Cornwall Show update)
On Saturday I teamed up with Falmouth University’s Makernow team to do a kids coding event at the Royal Cornwall Show with a new Raspberry Pi cube (based on the one used at the DeerShed Festival last year). We had a constant stream of families and kids wanting to try Scratch coding, and we had…
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Thinking Digital 2014
Last week I had the honour of both performing with Alex and presenting at Thinking Digital 2014. Suzy O’Hara invited me to represent the intersection of art, science and education of FoAM kernow and present the work I’ve been doing with the Sensory Ecology Group at Exeter University. I did a quick Egglab game demo…
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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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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…