9th Egham Jam – Show and Tell Competition – Prizes donated by Innovation in Education

The good news keeps in coming

Yesterday another pack of prizes arrived in the post for the next Egham Raspberry Jam Show and Tell Competition.  http://eghamjam9.eventbrite.com to register to attend and if you wish to have a chance of winning the prizes to bring along your Project to Show off.

Two (2) PiTrol kits from Innovation in Education were waiting fro me.
These are great kits as they allow you to build your own game controller with the instructions giving step by step details on how to solder it and then a snake game is also provided that works with the controller directly.

Kit of parts

Finished PiTrol

Nevil Hunt is the lead person at Innovation in Education and I have had the pleasure of meeting him at a few Egham Jams where he has come along with the PiTrol, 7 Segments of Pi and PiDapter (link from PiTrol site)

7 Segments of Pi is another simple idea that really captures the imagination. As the name states it is a large 7 segment display and button that you solder from a kit and then code is provided to play a game  

The PiDaptor allows you to connect 2 PiTrols to the one Raspberry Pi.

Each of these kits is great for learning to solder and with the provided code gives the owner the ability to understand how to read inputs from the GPIO pins and use it to play games.  Who doesn't want to play games on their Raspberry Pi.

In the case of The PiTrol prize once it has been soldered up I'd expect it would be possible to then get the controller to work with the many game emulators out there and possibly with the excellent RetroPi emulation system.

The Prize Pool is getting bigger and I'm still hoping to add a few more before the event.

List of online resources to assist in learning to code

The final session of the robot club at my kids school was Easter break and I promised them a handout detailing resources that are free they can use to continue to learn to code.  The kids were aged 10-12 and most were very new to coding so wanted to give a range of resources.  
They've spend the last term building small robots with an Arduino as the main controller so included Arduino as well as general programming resources.

As per the sheet a great combination for new people starting out if they don't have any hardware is the Earthshine Electronics guide and the AtuoDesk 123D Circuits online electronics and Arduino emulator.  The guide gives 14 projects of varying degrees of complexity from an electronics and programming standpoint and the AutoDesk 123D Circuits gives you a free resource to do your coding. The electronics pieces is done on a breadboard and is very visual. Reminds me of Fritzing.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B23BvTk93HRYSmZzU2RnclhhRlU/view?usp=sharing

If you'd prefer not to download the handout here is the list of links

Websites

Scratch - https://scratch.mit.edu/

Code.org - http://code.org/learn

BBC Dr. Who programming game - http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/doctor-who-game

Codecademy - http://www.codecademy.com/

AutoDesk 123D - http://www.123dapp.com/circuits

Books and Reading Material

Invent with Python - https://inventwithpython.com/

Earthshine Electronics – Arduino Starter Kit Manual - http://thearduinoguy.org/?page_id=100

YouTube Channels

Jeremy Blum, Tutorial Series for Arduino - http://bit.ly/1xrxqvr

Kevin Durrah - https://www.youtube.com/user/kdarrah1234/featured

The New Boston - https://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston/featured

Paper Marble Run - something different no electronics

I'm a big fan of encouraging creativity with low cost resources. I previously hacked a £6.00 remote control car to control it from a Raspberry Pi using Scratch and used a low cost eBay robot vehicle deck and wheels with a clone Arduino Pro Mini (all in for <£15.00).

Well some people aren't that into electronics and programming but are still looking for creative solutions.

I came across Marble Runs/Roller Coasters that you can buy and did a search online and found you can make you own from copper wire and also from stiff paper (200gsm). Never one to miss a chance to try something new I looked at the videos and made up templates for the paper marble run sections and began construction

After a fair few iterations and a lot of really small pieces of tape to put the bits together I finally had a set of templates that can be used to make a paper marble run.

This is the first video of the marble run. I really like the funnel and also that the marble comes off the end just below the funnel and because the moment is right it drops into the next channel/track section.

There is a fair bit of work in getting it stable and modifying the length of the straights and the curves so they work.  This is real tinkerer construction as the parts are not perfect and the design is evolving so regularly pieces need to be shortened, or bits added or the angle of the track needs to be modified to make it work.
Great fun going through all of this and learning about the properties of the paper, how strong the tape is and how to keep the marble going.

I then extended the run another bit. I like this view. There is something pleasing to me about the curves on the left section.

Finally I added a bumpy track and also a 'ladder' (no idea if that's it's name but it's the name I use) and more curves. This made the whole think a lot taller and works well. It does kind of unbalance the look and style of the overall marble run, so I think it is less pleasing to the eye than the earlier version.  Feels like when a skyscraper adds a large antenna to the top to officially be taller.

Here's the final video of the current Marble Run.

Overall I'm happy with the results and plan to make more runs.  A nice way to spend an afternoon/evening being creative.