The Holiday Hackafun Code Camps were a two-day program at Bulimba State School and Aspley State School. It was a great way for kids to learn about programming, innovation, collaboration, and creative thinking. There were two programs running: the Junior Program and the Senior Program. The Junior Program explored how to make your own computer games in Scratch, how to innovate and invent with Makey Makey electronics kids, and programming Ozobot robots to solve challenges. The Senior Program learned how to make more advanced games in Python, a text based language, how to program Micro: bit, and build their own websites using HTML and CSS.

All the students in this program were so excited to learn these programming tools and design and build their own games. It was an extraordinary experience for students to play the games that they built themselves and to share it with their friends and family. 

At Bulimba State School we started the day with unplugged games to learn about computational thinking skills. We played the Computational Garden game and learned about branching or conditional statements and iteration. Team Milla, Maya, Flynn and Spencer enjoyed this game and they were working hard to figure out how to collect carrots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next we completed an engineering challenge. Students built bridges with paddle pop sticks. We had limited resources and time constraints. Teams were given 20 paddle pop sticks and 1 meter of tape to construct a bridge to hold the weight of the juice boxes.  Students tested the limits of their paddle pop bridges with juice boxes as weight. The bridges were all quite creative given the time limit they were given (only 15 minutes!!!)

 

Our Senior Program students, Milla and Niamh, were busy coding in Python, a new coding language they picked it up in only two days! They learned how to use Python Turtle and draw shapes on the screen. Well done!! 

The afternoon class was an elective. The Junior Program students chose Makey Makey or Ozobots and the Senior Program students chose Micro: bit or Web Dev. Roy chose Makey Makey. He was excited to learn Makey Makey. He constructed his Makey Makey keypad with aluminium foil and paper. In this elective class, he learned how to use alligator clips and the Makey Makey circuit board to connect all the parts. 

We also completed another engineering challenge: spaghetti towers! Students made creative spaghetti towers. It was lots of fun!

These were a couple of our winning spaghetti towers which could hold quite a lot of marshmallows.

This was an impressive design as it was sturdy and held the weight of marshmallows on top. 

Some junior students chose to learn Ozobots as the afternoon activity. Ozobots is a toy robot which can be controlled by programming.

The students were so excited to work together to create a town for their Ozobots. They learnt how to program the Ozobots to follow the RGB colour sensor and move in different directions. When their Ozobots started moving was the most impressive moment!  Here is the Ozobot city they created and programmed!

 

 

Visiting from the future? Come along to our September Holiday Hackafun 2019 and come and join in on the fun!