Peterborough CAS Hub Write-Up

The first ever Peterborough CAS meeting was held last Thursday (as I write this). I had pimped this out on twitter, on here and it was on the CAS Community site too. So getting 10 eventbrite replies to say that people were coming was not bad I thought.
Anyway the prep for the first meeting had seemed to be going well, until a hiccup over refreshments for the evening occurred. But with some fancy work from one of our section assistants the refreshments disaster was averted.
9 teachers from 5 local schools turned up in the evening. I knew most of them, some just from brief conversations at our recent STEM Fair, a couple had beaten me up when I was dressed as a bear at a video game show (but that is a story for another day) and one was an ex-student of ours now teaching at a local school. On top of this was myself and my co-hub leader, and two colleagues. So for a first meeting not a bad turn out I thought.
The evening started off with the usual round the table introductions, and then we went straight in to our first presentation of the evening by Joanna Scott from e-skills. I say presentation it was more a round table discussion, with Joanna starting it off by describing who e-skills are and what they can offer teachers. Followed with those round the table giving feedback to Joanna about what e-skills could help them with. Joanna did point out that there were some great resources available for free from e-skills on their website, which it seemed most people are not aware of. There was to be a demonstration of the Big Ambition web site, however there was a problem with it which was down to either our firewall or version of flash. So that wasn't able to be shown. Which is a shame as the site looks like a great resource for students. They answer about 14 questions or so about themselves and then the site suggests IT or IT related careers that they might find of interest.
I think almost everyone got something out of this presentation including the speaker!
After a short break for refreshments, it was my turn to talk about project ideas for students using the Raspberry Pi. This was basically my brain dumping ideas based on stuff I had done with students, and future planned stuff to do. I tied this in with a kind of show and tell of the add on boards I have for the Pi so that people could see what they were like (but not running). Plus I had a large selection from my personal library of Python and Pi books for people to browse through as well.
After my talk we had a brief discussion to get feedback on the evening and to find out what people would like to see at the next one. The overall consensus was that it had been a good evening and folks had got some useful stuff out of it. But next time they wanted a more hands on practical session. So next time there will be two practical sessions being run. The first will be an arduino session being run by one of my colleagues (nicely co-opted into doing, dangers of going to a CAS meet I'm afraid), and I will be running a Raspberry Pi session using an add-on board (most likely the Pibrella).

What I would say is that if you are teaching IT/Computing and you are not part of the CAS Community go sign up here , find out where your nearest hub is and get along to the next meeting. It's a really friendly community of teachers and industry sharing resources and knowledge. It's great CPD (or whatever it is meant to be referred as now). And the face to face of a local hub makes a great networking opportunity and to find people to share ideas with locally.

First Peterborough CAS Meeting

24th April will see the first Peterborough CAS meeting.
If you are in the Peterborough area (or not) and teach ICT/IT/Computing why not come along?

The meet up will be between 5pm and 7pm, and will have a talk by Joanna Scott from e-skills, and a short presentation on project ideas for the Raspberry Pi.

Apart from the talks, it is also a great chance to network and share ideas.

Get your ticket for the meet up here on Eventbrite

Tuneful Pibrella

Continuing on from yesterdays post I promised to put up a possible solution to the challenge from the buzzer activity, which was to play a tune using the piezo speaker on the Pibrella board for the Raspberry Pi.

I do apologise for the fact that all my code does is play a scale, however in my defence I do not have a musical bone in my body.

Python,Pibrella and the Raspberry Pi CAS Talk 12th Feb 2014

This evening I did a talk entitled "Python, Pibrella and the Raspberry Pi" at my local CAS group (West Norfolk and Fens).
The talk started off with a quick overview of the GPIO, how to tell which revision Pi you are using. The anatomy of a Python program that uses the GPIO. It was then onto a quick tour of the Pibrella and what it offered the teacher in the classroom. The talk closed with some quick announcements about some up coming events I thought were of interest and a promotion for this blog!
It was then on to the hands on part of the session and people playing with the Pibrella on the Raspberry Pi.
Before the talk I had prepared some activity sheets each concentrating on one of the features of the Pibrella. The sheets are very basic in information they contain, and give a commented Python program for the person doing the activity to type in. After that activity has been completed people are then directed to complete one of the other activity sheets or to try a challenge.
These activity sheets especially the challenges do require some previous experience of programming in Python. And are deliberate in being a lot more challenging.

I also had a mini display of some other boards for the Pi there as well, such as the Piglow, PiLite, LEDBorg with the XLOBorg on a TriBorg!, and a PiFace Controll and Display.

I do get a bit insecure after giving these sort of talks. I keep wondering if people found them useful, did I meet expectations? was it pitched too high? or was it not detailed enough?
I love doing these sort of sessions, I love sharing ideas etc. And doing these CAS sessions fits in with my kind of hippy ideals. I like to help, I don't want anything in return, I'm not doing it for self promotion. I just want to contribute to the good of mankind! And I am hoping that was achieved this evening.

With that in mind here are the ...

Resources from talk

Please feel free to download and re-use and edit to your hearts content to meet your own needs.

The slides (powerpoint format) for the talk can be found here (this is a shared link to a file on Google Drive).
The LED activity sheet can be found here.
The Buzzer activity sheet can be found here.
The Switch activity sheet can be found here.
And sheet of some ideas for student projects can be found here.
And it's the same again for the four documents above, the are word documents (docx) and a shared link to the file on Google Drive.

Some thank you's

A big thanks to Michael Horne who runs the excellent Raspberry PiPod blog and CamJam (along with Geeky_Tim) for the loan of the Pibrella's for the session tonight. A big thanks also to Pimoroni and Cyntech for agreeing to the load also, and for getting back to me speedily with some last minute questions I had.

The next blog post will be the code for the challenge on the Buzzer activity sheet, which is to play a tune using the buzzer on the Pibrella.

Coffee Anyone?

 

This Friday I'm lucky enough to have been given permission to attend the Games Britannia Industry Speakers Day by work (I also have a ticket for the event as well). It would be really cool to meet up with folks while there if you are attending. Looking at the schedule for the event there are breaks at 14:30 and 17:15. Plus the usual before and after opportunities to mingle and socialise.

I'll be looking something like the following:

Above photo taken at the Indie Coffee meet up just before Christmas, photographer Shahid

So either drop me a line via twitter (@whitespider1066), or leave a comment below, or just come up and introduce yourself on the day.

While I'm pretending to have a social life I may as well mention that on the 8th February I'll be at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam (better known as CamJam). Followed by running a hands on session at my local CAS hub (that's the West Norfolk and Fens) on python, the Raspberry Pi, and the new add on board the Pibrella. I then have a couple of weeks off! There is then a STEM Fair at PRC on 19th March which I think local schools are coming too, and I am doing adhoc 5 minute talks for teachers of lesson ideas using the Raspberry Pi. But before the STEM Fair you will find me at the first Peterborough Raspberry Jam. I'm running the Programming Minecraft in the morning, and just enjoying the jam in the afternoon.

So I hope folks can make some of these events even if you ignore me, as I think you will have a cool time.

 

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Hour of Code Event in Sussex

Following on from my post yesterday about the Hour of Code next month came across this tweet today about one such event happening in Sussex.

 

Here is the full link http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cas-sussex-raspberry-pi-hour-of-code-tickets-9490150295?aff=estw

If you go would love to know how you got on.

 

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What to say?

First posts of a blog are always hard, well for me they are.

Last week I did a talk at a local CAS (Computing at Schools) meeting on Python and KS3. I knew I was going to be doing this talk for a while (before the Summer holidays), and I had been thinking "how do I support this talk?".
The idea of a blog quickly came to mind, and the name manic coding followed very quickly after. It kind of reminded me of my old retro games I enjoyed playing, such as Manic Miner and Jetpac. But also I thought it caught the mood of programming in education at the moment.
With the change of direction within the curriculum, moving from ICT to computing, there seems to be an air of panic. Due mainly to the Government not putting in any training budget to bridge the skills/knowledge gap, and expecting teachers to somehow get the knowledge and expertise required.
Luckily there is a great community out there on the CAS website, where sharing resources, constructive and informative discussion are the norm.

So here we are with the first post of Manic Coding.


NEWS: Wolfram Alpha comes to the Pi
Yesterday Wolfram Alpha announced to the world that in future releases of Raspbian the official Linux distro for the Raspberry Pi will now include a version of their Wolfram Language and Mathematica software.
As they point out in the post announcing this, the only other time that there software was bundled with a machine was the Next Cube from Next, which later got bought out by Apple and provided the basis for OS X. I wonder what did happen to the CEO of Next? (Yes I know it was Steve Jobs)

Wolfram Post Announcing Now on Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi Site Announce Wolfram Language and Mathematica on Pi, also includes how to get hold of it now.

What is exciting for me about this announcement is the fact that the Wolfram Language also supports physical computing via the GPIO (there is an example in the Wolfram link).
I've not used either the language or Mathematica, but I will be playing with it over the next few months (I'm sure I will write something about it on here).
I do like the potential that this gives for making some interesting lessons, and opening up the Pi for use in other subjects other than computing.

With Java (or the official Oracle port now part of Raspbian) the Raspberry Pi is becoming a nice little machine for those with a small budget to learn to program. For me the big advantage of the Raspberry Pi over using a PC/Mac/Linux computer is the cost and how easy it makes physical computing and connecting devices. It's being able to light up LED's, use a sensor, or control a robot that brings life to  the subject and gets children hooked.

See ya in the next post...

PS I think I'm down for doing a second talk in January on the Raspberry Pi and the devices that you can attach to it. I'm not sure how this will work yet. But an idea is formulating in my head as I type this up. I want it to be very hands on this time.