I’ve been fairly quiet recently, but at least I have a decent excuse. Way back in November, I was asked to help write a computational thinking scheme of work for some Canadian schools called Maple Bear – confusingly, I was told that the scheme would be deployed in Brazil, but I had great fun working with David Wall on 16 simple activities to promote computational thinking and computer science. David had seen me on Twitter and wanted to work with me and I really enjoyed writing the lesson plans with him. Fast forward to May this year and David sent me another email to see if I’d be able to trav ..read more

Ok, before I get started, I wanted to offer a huge thank you to Jamie at The Pi Hut for sorting me out with a copy of the MagPi with the AIY kit. You are a star! Back in May, the Internet exploded with the news that the MagPi magazine was offering a free Google AIY kit to use with Raspberry Pi. Copies sold out in minutes and people hunted across branches of WHSmiths to try and get their hand on one. Shops got new stock that sold out instantly. The concept? Google, working with Raspberry Pi, have created a simple voice-interaction module so that you can use your Pi like an Amazon Alexa (but pow ..read more

I know you guys love hearing about what I’m up to so here are a few fantastic events that I’ll be appearing it either running workshops or giving talks – it’d be great if you could come along and join in the fun! Firstly, this weekend I’m taking the pi-top Champions to The National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park museum for a weekend of training and fun – the most exciting thing about it is that on Sunday 19th the Champions will be running workshops in the National Museum of Computing, showing off exactly why we chose them – I’m so excited about this weekend and hope some of you can joi ..read more

[edit] As of June 2017, there is a version of Scratch 2.0 on Raspbian which makes this worksheet obsolete [/edit] After Sunday’s coding session, I set the boys the task of making our Scratch Sense Hat Cat Shake, just like Carrie Anne’s Interactive Pixel Pet. The first thing the boys did was to figure out how to use some of the sensors on the SenseHat – remember how in my other post, I said it was good practice to run the basic broadcast command before you do anything. We had found some code from Albert’s GitHub page, however, when we tried to select the sensor value for accelerometer, we only ..read more

[edit] As of June 2017, there is a version of Scratch 2.0 on Raspbian which makes this worksheet obsolete [/edit] So, I absolutely LOVE the Interactive Pixel Pet activity from the Raspberry Pi website, and while I was playing with the Sense Hat the other day, I realised it was possible to imitate it using Scratch. So far I’ve only got it running as an animation, so next step is to get the shake function working as we’ve just figured out how easy it is to use the other sensors on the hat using Scratch. I had a play and managed to get a very cool dancing cat on my LED matrix – I’m not going to l ..read more

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about burning SD cards on a mac… but I’m not gonna lie, I found it quite difficult to do. You can imagine my delight, when someone at work suggested I try Etcher near the end of last year. What a fantastic app for making burning SDcards easy! Just a reminder – when you’re using a Raspberry Pi, you need to install an operating system on your microSD card. Most Pi users install Raspbian, however, I’ve been using pi-topOS a lot for work. Installing an OS usually requires wiping the SD card manually then using clumsy software or even accessing the command line ..read more

Since I’ve been working for pi-top, I’ve experienced being on the other side of the EdTech system and it’s certainly been a bit of an eye-opener I’ve tested various products over the years and found problems and complaints, bugs and surprises, delights and nightmares, but it has been a really interesting experience for me being a producer of content rather than just a consumer. Firstly, I thought it would be really easy to implement all of the things on my ‘want’ list – it turns out that it’s nowhere near as easy to just ‘add a button that prints out all of the users’ or ‘add a widget that all ..read more

My picademy training was over two years ago now, but the experience remains one of the most inspiring two days of my life. As I’ve said so many times before, it literally changed my life. So, you can imagine my delight when I was invited to Glasgow Picademy, this time as a trainer. I got to spend four days with two sets of trainees and see them go through the same life-changing experience I did. So, the format for those of you who don’t already know – first of all attendees are talked through the benefit of Pi and then it’s straight to work learning some basics of physical computing. Unlike my ..read more

I will do a proper write up soon, but for those who were in my workshop, here is a downloadable version of the two worksheets, plus a link to the prezi and links to the resources that I showed you! Scratch workshop – Python Scratch workshop – pi-top Prezi – Scratch-ing the Surface of GPIO pi-top Pi-Stop (traffic lights) Pimoroni Flotilla CamJam EduKit 1 (plus free worksheets) CamJam EduKit 3 (robotics kit – plus free worksheets) Astro-Pi Sense Hat Kit (as sent to the ISS) I think that was all of the things that I shared with you, but please let me know if there was anything else you wanted fur ..read more

First of all I’d like to thank you all for the positive responses to my first blog about the CamJam EduKit 3 – loads of you commented, retweeted and even offered some really helpful advice. Yesterday, Louise came around and we embarked on phase two of the robot build. On Wednesday I hosted a Coding Evening in Twickenham and quite a few attendees brought along their robots. Richard Hayler brought his CamJam robot which was controlled by a bluetooth keyboard – what impressed me most is that Richard had written his code and then set up the pi so that it automatically started running on boot up. I ..read more