Hallowe’en Scratch Challenge

Today was the final day of our dojo’s Hallowe’en Scratch Challenge. To make things more interesting some ninjas arrived after school dressed up as thier favourite Book Week characters. Watch out for Harry Potter and The Hulk.


The winner will be awarded the coveted EU Code Week button badge.

EU Code Week 2018 with micro:bits

EU Code Week 2018

We decided to to have EU Code Week in our dojo this week. Our mentor brought some new ideas back from MegaDojo 2018 in Maynooth last Saturday. We put otheBBC micro:bits we received from DoderDojo HQ to the test.

We checked out all the built-in sensors and carried out a few simple tasks using a tiny bit of code.

SASNS ninjas on a micro:bit challenge

A few simple lines of code and we could get the micro:bit to read the room temperature and light level.

Checking the temperature and light level at the door using a micro:bit

The light reading changed to 248 at the door and 93 under the workststion. The temperature dropped by 3 degrees at the door.

It was great fun! Did you know you can make a simple FitBit with a BBC micro:bit?

Baking a Pi

The microSD card on my Raspberry Pi 3 got damaged on Open Day last May. So I had to set it up all over again. The first time was very exciting but this time it was really boring. It took up most of the dojo time and I almost started my homework but I was afraid I might have to press a button or something so I waited. The Raspberry Pi makers should make it play music or have a game on the screen for you to play while you are waiting. It was all worth it when it finished.

It has reached 100 per cent, now what?

I hope it gets more exciting than this stuff.

Ninjas waits as Raspian finally boots.

Installing NOOBS takes a long long time.

NOOBS means New Out Of Box Software. Our mentor had it downloaded for us but he showed us how to get on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/noobs/ Make  sure you pick the full version and not the LITE one.

First of all I had to format the microSD card in the card reader. To do that I had to use a SD card adapter card to make it fit in the slot. You have to use a special app called SD card Formatter https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4 to make sure it works.

Scratch 2 Python

It was very noisy at the dojo today. Everyone was excited because we tried something new. It turned into a race  with some groups but they made lots of mistakes. My group took our time.

Interesting! So far, so good.

Don’t forget the end bracket.

I got it!

It is European Code Week 2018 and some of us in the dojo are going to try to move from Scratch to Python. First we had to download MU from the internet. MU is a really simple Python editor for beginner coders. The Raspberry Pi group go about things slightly different but it works the same.

Our mentor handed gave each group a cheat sheet  to make things a bit easier. The biggest delay was the MU download because everyone was doing it at the same time. Our mentor said he will have MU on a USB key for the next dojo.

Python is very tricky because if you forget to hold down the SHIFT key you get a ; instead of : and then you get an error.  My coding buddy spotted the mistake.

Typing in text for Python is very sloooooow. Scratch is fast!