Children meet and learn about robots
Students, parents and teachers from Bulimba State School visited the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (The Centre) at QUT, Gardens Point Campus. The Centre is the world’s first centre that focuses on creating robots that can see.
Term 1 starts tomorrow
Term 4 starts tomorrow and we want to send a big thank you to all the schools, libraries and organisations that we have worked with us this year. The Coding Kids team is looking forward to finishing the year off with a bang.
Want extra ideas for your coding clubs?
Here are some of the activities we do at our Coding Kids clubs: program with Scratch, program with Python, program mBot, program Lego Mindstorms EV3, and build digital solutions with Makey Makey.
Knight Collects the Coins in the Castle
Scratch is a versatile, online program that can be used to teach several important skills as well as maintaining a level of fun and engagement through the use of game and animation creation. Today, we’ll focus on a game called Knight collects the coins in the castle, which you can find here. This game is fun to make and play and uses concepts like x and y coordinates, sensing, decision making and variables. These are important skills, both for computer programing and for the development of problem solving skills.
6 fundamentals of coding
There are only 6 fundamental concepts of coding. We covered the first three concepts in a previous blog post. Let’s go through the last three concepts here: arithmetic, data storage, data in / data out.
Year 5-6 students completed Demo Day and the winner is…
Demo Day is short for demonstration day where Startups demonstrate their end product. Students presented their Scratch computer game, then we all voted and the winner was …
3 logic patterns of coding
Coding, or computer programming, is built on three basic logic patterns:
- Sequencing
- Branching
- Looping
These three ideas form the basis of all coding knowledge.
Programming Pepper, the friendly humanoid robot
This week at the Pepper Studio, in Brisbane, we held a 5 day Pepper workshop. In this workshop, the kids learned how to use Choregraphe software to create programs for Pepper with both drag and drop code and python.
“Is this correct?”
“Is this correct?” This is a typical question students new to coding ask their teachers. There’s nothing wrong in asking per se, but it highlights the effects of grading on hindering the development of a growth mindset.
Judging at the Young ICT Explorers QLD
Let me share my experiences as judge for the Young ICT Explorers Year 5-6 category: technologies used, projects experienced and tips from a judge on how to get the most points for each criteria.