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.
Super Saturday at Corinda State School
This had been Coding Kids first term at Corinda State School. We had been delivering coding workshops as part of their Super Saturday events every term since early 2016. It’s great to now be a part of the school community every week. Details from the…
Demo Day at St Catherine’s
We finished Term 2 of Coding Kids at St Catherine’s Primary School in Wishart. On the final day of the program students were asked to present their favourite Scratch project that they have made. This is known as Demo Day.
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.
How did I get here? Now, where to from here?
My name is Emily de la Pena and I am the Founder of Coding Kids. I started Coding Kids in January 2016. Now, 15 months later we are operating at 20 schools in South East Queensland and travelling throughout regional Queensland. How did I get here? I’m not a teacher nor am I a programmer. So let me start at the beginning.
Problems are an Opportunity
Running my own business means days filled with fire fighting and trouble shooting. Customers come to me with problems, employees come to me with problems, partner organisations and other stakeholders come to me with problems. But I love it. Problems are an opportunity to excel, highlight our strengths, create value and develop the best solution in the market. Problems are a call to action to move us to create a desired future.
What is the best programming language to get a job?
Coding classes for children are so much fun. They build computer games, animated stories and digital artwork. After a hard day at school, they come to us and we let our imaginations run wild and be creative. In the process, they learn timeless skills such as computational thinking, problem solving, logic, design and creativity.
But these questions makes me wonder, do children’s piano classes, swimming classes or speech and drama classes get asked the same questions?
6 fundamental concepts 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.
Let’s start from Scratch and learn to code: Part 3
In case you missed it… On Thursday 11 May, we ran our third and final session in a three-part series of web conferences: Let’s start from Scratch and learn to code. Part 3: Let’s build a computer game and make learning about Cartesian coordinates fun. Learn about algorithms, sequencing, branching and looping.
Is coding only for geeks, gamers or geniuses?
Is coding only for people who like maths, logic, and analytical thinking? For geeks, gamers or geniuses? Or is coding a means to create for the arts, human-centred design, empathy, storytelling, human connection, building imaginary worlds, characters and adventures, social impact and creative expression.