CamJam May 2014

First post of the day and a look at some of the show and tell stuff.

That's right folks an Oculus Rift working with a Raspberry Pi. Will get some video later I think.

Also might have to get a dev kit myself now to try this, bugger more money.

The old fan favourite of the Maplin USB robotic arm.

Above and below more staples of show and tell pi controlled robots.

Above a plant watering system controlled by a pi.

Less suppliers this time due to the heavier focus on workshops, and the education track. However one or two new faces displaying goods.

Such as The Little British Robot Company

Or Fuze

 

Seven Segments of Pi guy had a couple of new toys to show

 

PiHut were also here

Above Clive (Raspberry Pi boss type person for their education team) and Alan (@teknoteacher) waiting for the education track to start and give their talks.

Above from the show and tell, a student had made this. When he moves his arm it moves the robotic arm. Uses accelerometers which is pretty cool. I like this idea a lot, and really impressed that the student came up with this. A great idea love it.

My bit of CamJam

Well I did the talk, which ended up being more live demo of the Pibrella. Not my best moment, I hope the teachers in the room at least found it informative and could see how easy it is to program using the official python library. I know my talk was not as entertaining or interesting as the sonic pi guy. Boy was that well presented.

The workshop I was a lot happier with and that went well. There was just enough in the worksheet for people to get through, plus enough time for some to play around with the pibrella, extending what they had been shown in the worksheet. Sadly for one student after the workshop they went off to buy a pibrella and they had all been sold! I even got to meet Phil Howard who wrote the pibrella python library. Have I said how much I like the pibrella python library? No! Well it's rather good. Except for one thing and this is sooooo nit picky, the yellow LED in the library is referred as Amber! I'm not the only one to notice this one of the students tried to use the yellow LED and it failed as it wasn't defined. Luckily I had come across this and was able to point out in the library it's Amber.

It was nice afterwards that some people come up to me and thanked me for the workshop and said they enjoyed it.

So on the whole between the talk and the workshop they evened each other out to average I think.

The rest of the jam

The Educational thread was kicked off with a keynote by Clive Beale of the Raspberry Pi organisation. Clive for a long time was their only education person but now he heads a small team. Clive had the message of "Don't panic" about the new curriculum, and gave a brief rundown how the Pi fitted in and embodied some of aims and principles behind the new curriculum. There was also news that the Raspberry Pi org was launching a £1 million fund to promote computing and applications would be open soon. He also pointed out that the PiAcademy was adding two new CPD sessions in June and July with applications being taken at the moment. Once again applications are only for teachers in schools, and those of us in FE teaching in colleges are ruled out. Apparently there will sessions opened out to the rest of us in other education institutes in the future. This is a big bug bear of mine. So often those of us in FE are treated as second class citizens in the academic world. Everything is aimed at teachers these days it seems, with scraps going to FE. I wouldn't mind but it seems a slap in the face of my students. That they aren't as important as those still at school. Well that's not true, they are equally as important. And it's time they are treated as such. Wow where did that come from? Rant over.

Next up was a talk about STEM Ambassadores by Elizabeth Crilly and David Whale. It would of been nice if they had also plugged the Video Game Ambassador program too but hey that's me being hypercritical. Of note is two upcoming events of a STEM Fair Duxford on the 11/12 June this year, and and Engineering Festival on 14/10/15.

After this was a bloody brilliant demonstration of Sonic Pi by Samuel Aaron. It was a very engaging, passionate talk. I can see the use of Sonic Pi and how students get engaged with it. But as soon as he said there was a Mac/PC version (not supported at the moment) I thought why use it on a Pi then? And also that it was limited and would be fun for teaching some core principles for a few lessons but then something else would have to be used.

Next Sophie Dee talked about Code Club Pro and Code Club. The take home from this talk for me was that although the materials on their site were aimed at primary school they were being used in secondary as well.

The final talk before mine was Gordon Henderson and Fuze Basic and the case/keyboard. I like the look of the keyboard/case they sell. It looks very solid and I can see this being a good addition for the classroom. The Fuze basic looked interesting and a good alternative to Python as the text based programming language for KS3. I would of liked to have seen them demo the GPIO interface, but they did one better and showed that they were able to connect to Minecraft on the Pi. I'd love to see how the Fuze basic holds up/compares to the BBC basic that is on RISC OS (why no port to Raspbian?)

Then it was me up with my train wreck. You can see how much of a train wreck if you look at the recordings of the live stream.

I missed what was by all reports a very entertaining and inspiration talk by Alan O'Donohoe. Sadly it clashed with the Pibrella workshop I was running.

But I did catch the last three talks of the day. The Seven Segments of Pi talk was ok. While the CAS talk by Master Teacher James Robinson was good, although it did give the impression that the CAS Master teachers were rather focused on Cambridge and surrounding area. Cambridgeshire is more than Cambridge. Finally the day ended with a panel made up of PiAcademy students from the first ever PiAcademy last Easter.

Sadly my agenda of getting bits for my robot, like a chassis, maybe some sensors didn't happen, even though there were some kits there, I didn't want a pre-made kit. And some how I didn't get to learn how to solder either!

I did get to see the Kano Pi stuff that was on kickstarter. I love the keyboard they are making for it. I'd love to have that for use in class. Bluetooth, not too large but larger than the small Bluetooth one I have already. A nice usable size.

Today was an awesome day, there were some great talks, great workshops and it was great to meet up with familiar faces, and meet new ones. Did I say I met Alan O'Donohoe and how awesome he is? Alan is @teknoteacher on twitter and does an amazing podcast on teaching GCSE computing.

 

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It's CamJam this Saturday

It's time for another CamJam this Saturday. Wow hasn't the time flown by?

This one is of particular interest to those in education because there is a "Focus on Education" track in the main lecture hall. You can get the full list of talks going on here. If you have popped over there to see what the talks are then you may recognise a name or two on the list. Amongst the great and the good list there is a fraud. Yep you will see my name there giving a talk on the Pibrella. When you have the likes of Alan O'Donohoe, Clive Beale, Craig Richardson there giving talks, I can't help thinking blooming heck! Maybe I'm there to help them look even more awesome! 

At the moment I have about 20 minutes to fill talking and if I feel brave enough demoing the Pibrella on the Pi. Then at ten past three I'm running a hands on workshop on the Pibrella (you can see the full list of sold out workshops here). 

Yes, I am feeling rather nervous about the weekend. I want to do my best and help people, give them something they will find useful. 

Please if you are attending and you see me, say "Hi". I will be very nervous in the run up to the talk, and then totally down afterwards that it wasn't good enough. So it would be great to meet new folks.

Oh and as usual during and after wifi etc permitting there will be a massive post on the day.
So hopefully see some of you Saturday.

UPDATE #1: Was just thinking being on such an esteemed list of speakers kind of takes me back to the time that I tried stand up comedy. I had been doing a few open mic spots at my local pub at the time. There wasn't much competition there, I was the only one trying stand up the rest were doing poetry readings. But after some success (i.e. I was getting the odd laugh with my material) I decided to try doing open mic spots elsewhere. To cut a longish story short meant I managed to get myself one of the in much demand open spots at the Comedy Store in London. In fact the date I had for my open spot was a day or two before my birthday, so friends and family came along with me to the Comedy Store for my big moment. Boy what a moment that was. The compare for the evening was Jeff Green, the opening act was Mark Thomas, I can't remember the rest of the line up for the night, the place was packed. The front row was taken up by drunk policemen if I remember correctly, they were definitely drunk that was for sure. My spot was in the second half of the show. I died big time that night, I remember my legs shaking so much, I was heckled by the drunk lot at the front. The heat of the lamps on the stage is still vivid in my memory, I can still feel the heat now as I write this. When the red light camp on to tell you to wrap up it seemed a relief from the slaughter. Afterwards comforted by friends and family I was very emotional (there may have been leaky eyes). Probably one of the bravest things I've ever done. As you read the above you probably are thinking that it wasn't a very enjoyable experience, and maybe at the time it didn't feel that way. But looking back I am so glad that I did it. I gave it ago. Not many people can say that they tried what I had done.
The only link is between the two experiences (one not happened yet) is the strong line ups with little ol' me stuck in the middle. This I suppose is my geeky version of the Comedy Store this weekend at CamJam. 

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.

A brief concern about scratch on the pi

 

This morning on twitter a tweet is doing the rounds announcing that there is now a version of scratch that supports the Minecraft api.

It's great that there is now a version that now allows programming of Minecraft using the api on the Raspberry Pi (Get here).

However what concerns me is that there are to my counting now three versions of scratch on the Raspberry Pi. The basic original flavour, a version that supports the GPIO, and joining them the Minecraft version. So depending on what a teacher wants to do on the Raspberry Pi they have to make sure they have installed and selected the correct version to use. Let alone how confusing for students.

I hate this sort of splintering, and to stop confusion, and to make sure the versions keep in step with each other (Bug fixes, features etc), these projects need to co-ordinate and merge into a single release for the Raspberry Pi.

It's fantastic that people out there care enough to do this, but please care enough to make things easy for students, teachers, and users in general too.

 

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Unity 3d PSM Vita Beta Open to Public

 

This morning in my twitter feed Shahid tweeted a blogpost from the Unity3d guys about the beta version of Unity3d that's supports Playstation Mobile(PSM) on the Vita is now open to the public and is currently (my use of currently not theirs) also free.

Well this is amazing news. Sony have been really generous already with the Vita and PSM by already giving access to the public to this setup for free with making a dev environment available for free. Which is pretty awesome and cool.

So it was already pretty amazing that you could teach students how to write games in C# and XNA and port them (easily using Monogame) to the Vita and PSM. Yeah we use C# and XNA, so althought the PSM Vita dev kit uses C# I've not had to learn a new engine (although the PhyreEngine looks pretty cool and I really should find sometime to play with it).I think there is real value in students being able to see something they have created on a console like the Vita. It seems to have more of an impact than being on a PC/Mac.

To be able to do this though you need a PSM developer licence which was (not sure if still the case) free. So what we have already from Sony is a free dev setup for the PS Vita that can be used in the classroom. So no need to for a dev kit for the Vita and Sony First (which I've not had much luck with so far). The drawback is that this setup is limited to just writing games for the Vita, and not the other Sony consoles like the PS3 or PS4.

However Unity3d is the darling development environment of the moment, especially amongst indie game devs, and some studios. And from my point of view allows a nice reuse of skills because one of the scripting languages it supports is C#. So being able to use Unity3d to make games for the Vita via PSM is pretty amazing. Although I still find the workflow in Unity3d challenging! That's my problem because I need to use it more regularly, and not just dip in and out of it at irregular intervals when I have a spare moment (and we know how rare they are in education).

But Unity3d does do some of the work for students, ie provide an engine and environment, that once learnt allows students to concentrate on creating a game, and not a game and an engine. So now being able to make use of the wow factor of playing a student created game on a console makes Unity3d an even more attractive proposition.

I do have to say that Unity3d does need to get its act together when it comes to education, and become a bit more education friendly. Especially when it comes to pricing. But that is a subject for a future post.

You can read the full Unity3d blog post here [http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/04/08/playstationvita-for-all-the-unity-for-playstationmobile-public-preview/]

 

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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

Ciseco Pi-LITEr

I think this little LED board has been out a little while, but Pimoroni have it as a new product.
But hey let's not get into a discussion when it came out etc and let's concentrate on what amazing value this is.

This little 8 white LED board by Ciseco costs an amazingly cheap £3! Yep that is a super bargain price. Fantastic value and at a price that is affordable to equip a class with them.
The sort of uses suggested for the Pi-LITEr are I/O status indicator, bar graph, light chaser, activity indicator and lighting effects. If you need all the technical specs about power consumption, dimensions and weight have a read of the pdf linked to at the end of this post.

I was hoping to be really lucky and have it happily sitting on a TriBorg along with an XLoBorg and an LedBorg (as shown in the photo below).

Sadly when I ran one of the LedBorg little test python programs it also started to light up some of the LEDs of the Pi-LITEr. Which means the LedBorg and the Pi-LITEr share a GPIO port or two. So my little dream of having a nice handy TriBorg loaded up with three handy little GPIO add-on boards is still a little pipe dream. In this case it either has to have the LedBorg on or the Pi-LITEr. 

Why did I want the setup with three on? Well it would make a nice little plugin that could be used in class by students, that would offer a little bit of variety for the students in what they are interfacing to, but also have minimum setup involved (I'm all about minimum setup, so that teachers/students can use their time productively in the class. Yes I know there is educational value in getting the students to install it etc, but sometimes you just want to plugin and play). 

Using the Pi-LITEr with python doesn't require any installation of any extra libraries etc (assuming that RPi.GPIO is already installed - which I think it is by default in Raspbian). It can be controlled using RPi.GPIO (pins used in the pdf linked to below) or if you are a WiringPi fan that too. I'd imagine that ScratchGPIO might be able to use it too (but I'm not a Scratch person).

You can get the Pi-LITEr from Pimoroni HERE

You can read the technical docs (as a pdf) for the Pi-LITEr for the HERE