Tag: minecraft
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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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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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Foam Kernow mini update
A short update on the things currently going on at Foam Kernow alongside the stuff I’ve been blogging about lately. We are near completion of a new version of the butterfly hunting game – this time being developed for the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where it will be a citizen science exhibit…
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Flotsam: A prototype screenless livecoding language
Two languages are working with Flotsam, the new name for the prototype screenless tangible programming language I’ve been building (which comes from the fact it’s largely made from driftwood). It’s somehow already been featured on the Adafruit blog! The circuit seems to be fully debugged now, with short circuits fixed – which took a little…
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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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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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Self replicating structures in Minecraft
A little gallery of accidents and broken experiments. All the code here. A little island of original pristine environment in danger of being swamped:
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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…