Everytime

I am a bit upset, the successful after-school computer club I run has been turned down for funding, again (4th time), it is apparently too exclusive and only for the students I teach.

I teach kids, adults and teachers creative computing (programming, game design, animation, sound and electronics) all over the UK for both public and private companies, but this is what I do in Suffolk, for Suffolk (but if you can make it to the sessions and live outside of Suffolk that is ok too).

Earlier this year we were able to raise a £1000 pounds through peoplefund.it and get sponsors like YoYo Games, O'Reilly, Rapid Electronics, I Love Electronics, and Young Rewired State. This gave us enough funds to buy the insurance, electronic components, the LEGO and the animation cameras we needed to run the 8 week pilot course. It was a success, it was picked up by the BBC Radio and within hours we had a waiting list. We went from 8 kids to 20, and we now have a waiting list of over 80 kids. Kids are simply cueing to get in to these lessons.

We needed to expand, so I contacted a school I have worked with locally and cut a deal whereby I would come in and teach every now and then for free and they would let me use the room after school for the computer club. And it is perfect, it is safe, warm, well lit and it has computers that work, which now means students who don't have a laptop can also join in, making it more inclusive.

It is a success, so much so the parents have asked for schedule so they can plan their holidays around the club, students rarely miss a session and some travel up to 40 minutes to get to the one and a half hour sessions because they enjoy them so much. Feedback from the parents and teachers has shown me the work they do in the club impacts positively both on their school work and their sociability, with some of the quietest introverted students suddenly becoming mentors and helping others. Many of the students are now taking pride in their work because they can see their school work in more of a context of things they are interested in. Maths is now cool, we don't say that, but we know if we learn more about it our games, our robots, or hardware will become better.

These students are being prepared to be creative with computers these are the makers of the future, they are well beyond ICT/IT or whatever you want to call it, their level of understanding computers has taken them to the point of designing and thinking about prototyping new hardware. Making games instead of playing them all day, being creators of technology instead of just consumers of technology.

What the hell is it I am doing wrong? Why is something that is so successful and showing positive results, constantly being refused funding?

I don't want to charge the parents, I want it to be as inclusive as possible and many have to travel quite far to get to the sessions as it is.

These 90 minute sessions have to be explosive, they have to be fantastic, they have to be so good that the students are so enthusiastic about them that they interested enough to take part and they take a lot of planning. As it is, I have to give up Tuesdays (my entire Tuesday 8am to 8pm) to prepare and organize the club, and this is unpaid work.  I don't mind that, but having a some funding would mean I could do more, take time off to plan out more of the club, fill out more ridiculously huge funding applications.

In addition to this I am planning to set up 7 to 11-year-old computing club because, THERE IS A NEED FOR IT, so things are about to get even more hectic very shortly, but that is ok, because I know it is the right thing to do.

This year we plan to launch a weather balloon and collect data, and do a few fields trips to technology based companies to see the things they are learning and interested in, in action. I don't know how but I know we will.

I just don't know what I am doing wrong. If you do, please let me know.

***EDIT January 6th, 2013***

I have now setup a Paypal donate button in the right hand sidebar, anything you can donate will be greatly received to help these kids keep doing these sessions.

CCC Christmas Social

For the last two sessions of CCC in December we have decided to take it easy and play Minecraft, some learning and hacking of networks (to set up Minecraft LAN) has been going on too, but for the most part it is all about having a break before we start on the big project in the new year. Our upper atmosphere space probe.

Today, I brought in a simple prototype for some goggles that can control the direction of the mouse by moving the head. I built a simple game in Game Maker whereby you avoid bad guys chasing you and collect coins. The goggles cost £1.29, two infrared LEDs, 180 ohm resistor, 9v battery clip and 9v battery. Approx £5.00 in total. Really good fun.

The goggles worked great and I think this is something we will explore more later in the year with 3D environments, sadly for some reason it just wouldn't work with Minecraft though.

Next week will be even more relaxed as we will simply be having a gaming competition/xmas party, so lots of cake and games :)

Creative Computing Club - October 9th 2012

After a few teething problems with moving in to the new venue (i.e. setting up software, accounts all that kind of stuff) fortunately we have got down to some programming, we are a much bigger group now so it is both tricky and nice to take on the new challenge of delivering such technical sessions to a larger group. (see photo)

We are making a top down shooter kind of like a generic tanks game, but some of the students have come up with some very nice alternatives, we have a virus vs. bacteria type game, zombie apocalypse and a few airplane games too.

It is a good mix of different skill levels and ages, the youngest being 10 oldest being 15, some have loads of programming experience some of them none at all.

It was also nice to finally have everyone on the same page, and have everyone working on their own separate game but at the same time helping each other.

I got to see another one of those moments, when you see a student see his or her work come to life and start moving around the screen, they often take more ownership and more pride in their work. It's great and we have a lot more to come.

New start, new place new logo

I am quite pleased to announce Creative Computing Club has returned we are now based at Parkside School, in Ipswich and a sincerest of thanks must be said to all the staff for allowing us to make it our new home.

I have run many workshops with Parkside School and they have always been supportive of the types of projects I run. The main advantage of having the sessions their is that it comes with a full PC and Mac suite, so it doesn't matter if the student has their own computer or not they can attend, making the sessions more inclusive.

Our first session back was just to introduce everyone to everyone else, and outline the years curriculum we will be covering  Game Maker, Processing, Arduino, digital illustration, animation, sound and circuit bending, LEGO Mindstorms and a lot more.

We will also be building up to a big project but that is top secret for now.

Creative Computing Club and Young Rewired State

What we did.

I am really pleased that we have been able to setup a Young Rewired State center for this years festival of code, it is an intensive five days of coding to create new apps, games or webpages using open source data.

We ended up hosting it a Greenfinch Church, in Ipswich the Pastor and his wife are lovely and I am truly grateful for them to allow us to host it there, we could not have done it with out their help. 

 


The Creative Computing Club have met several times for the regular club but this was different as they had to work towards a specific goal and they had to work together, we were also joined by some new recruits who plan to join in with CCC in September.

I really noticed it on Tuesday, they weren't just learning to code, they were also learning to communicate with each other. They were learning about each others skills, strengths and learning how to delegate and at the same time be diplomatic, during this I just sat back and listened to them, I really wanted to see how they would cope and only join in if the needed me. They have done wonderfully well the group aged 10 to15 years old, it is a really difficult thing to do, to plan an activity together and be aware of each others feelings.

Originally we had two Olympic Games based on the BBC's athlete data, one Zoo game based on the London Zoological Data with two more games by participants who are just simply learning to code, but in the end the two Olympic games merged.
 

We had our work cut out for us, none of them have ever made any kind of webpage before, so it was a matter of teaching them some basic HTML first and then, making the games in HTML5 to upload.

The second wonderful thing that happened during the week was just how much they were helping each other, the level of peer to peer mentoring was incredible, they all love working with computers, but it seems they also like to help others. I was able to sneakily listen (and learn) how to mod a Minecraft skin, which I will impress my son with next week. I also got to hear an older brother take his sibling through the first steps of coding in Game Maker and have the patience of a saint while doing it.

We have worked incredibly hard, so much so by Wednesday I had to remind them to take lunch breaks, the hard work however has paid off as we now have four games made over the week, several new coders and now coders having experienced a second programming language in that week. Three of the participants could only stay til Wednesday which make their feat of programming two games in three days all the more impressive.



The Games

Miner Man

My by two first-time coders Miner Man is a two player underground adventure.The two man team had just three days to make it, very proud of them both.

http://pixelh8.co.uk/YRS2012/MINERMAN/


 Stick Olympics

Amazing Physics and using the BBC Athlete data, take a shot and see how well you can do. Choose from several of the top archers in this excellent group effort.

 http://pixelh8.co.uk/YRS2012/STICK/


Granny Zoo

Based on the the London Zoological Society and the idea of an imaginary zoo featuring some of the animals, this a top view interactive zoo adventure designed by a ten-year-old! Make sure you go in the Aquatic centre AMAZING? Works on iPad too!

http://pixelh8.co.uk/YRS2012/GRANNYZOO/

Cheese Man

Cheese Man is made by another first time code, get the good cheese and avoid the bad. This was made by a solo coder, with help from friends, brilliant stuff.

http://pixelh8.co.uk/YRS2012/CHEESEMAN/

By the end of close Thursday we all knew what we had to do, upload the info compile the games upload them, tomorrow on Friday we are going to take it easy, play games, eat cake. I am going to teach them some Xcode in the morning as they have asked to learn about iPad/iPhone development, so we will do that first, but that is it, it is time to relax.

Friday

I arrived bleary-eyed on Friday morning without a pack-up lunch but to several wonderful surprises, one being this amazing array of treats and two being the two wonderful cards the participants and parents had made for me. It was a nice chilled out day. We did a little Xcode development, and wrote up some short diary entries of the our week, it was great fun.

Testimonials

"I have really enjoyed this week at CCC because it has inspired me even more too make games and work with a team of people who are also interested in making games and programming, I have also found out that i'am very good with graphics and ok with code. I would also like to go to YRS next year and make even more games to a high standard, all of the team has worked well on the Olympic Game and i think that it has a very good chance of winning but we will just have to wait and see. My job for this project was to make the faces for the Bios and help out with the game graphics."

"I enjoyed my time working on the stick-lympics game, I made all of the bio's for all the athletes in the game, it was fun. I also enjoyed working with others because they bring different ideas together and makes everything easier."

"I’ve very much enjoyed this week doing the Young Rewired State and it has helped improve my knowledge in teamwork and organisation. I’ve also learnt to use HTML programming during this time and had a brief overview of XCode, which is used to create and simulate Apple product games that you create. Overall, I’ve had a great time and I’ll definitely be back next year for the next presentation." "I have had a lovely time as I have been drawing graphics for my brother who is the scripter for the game ‘stick—lympics’. My brother has been a real help when I had nothing to do he was their multitasking doing not just his game but helping with mine ‘build and mine’ which was very fun!!!

"I have tried to help others with ideas on what we could do and when I get home I have helped Ryan with graphics and ideas on ‘stick—lympics’. Many thanks to matt as when Ryan wasn’t there to help he was and without him we wouldn’t of achieved what we have"

"I have loved the time i have had at YRS im going to miss it so much and i have made A game with help from Tom and Henry and Matt special thanks to Matt."

So there you go!

I am really proud of all of the Creative Computing Club, they have done incredibly well, I look forward tomorrow and when we return in September.

Follow me on Twitter here @pixelh8 or the Creative Computing Club @CCCSuffolk here.

Creative Computing Club and Young Rewired State

I am really pleased to announce that the Creative Computing Club will be entering in to the fun that is Young Rewired State with both our 12 to 16 group and our under 12s group. I have my work cut out for me though as I have just discovered none of them in either group has 1) any experience in web based technology and 2) has never done anything like this before.

 So I have booked a week off work and on the 6-12th of August I will be training them from the ground up. I don't know what we will make but I am certain we will have fun and learn a lot by doing it.

I said there would be cake.

Today was the last session of the Creative Computing Club this time it was the exhibition, with the students showing off what they had been making. The only rule was that their exhibits needed to show off something they had learned while being a part of the Creative Computing Club. Amusingly all of them put forward their Game Maker games they had been expanding on since the Game Maker session, so for many it was a chance for the students to try out to try out each others games.

Unexpectedly and rather brilliantly the students started teaching each other how they did different things in their games, there were many brilliant ideas, but more importantly they were being shared. It also nice to see many have upgraded to the HTML5 version and beyond to start getting their games out in to the wide world.

I have updated the Game Maker gallery here so please check out the screenshots of their games.

This is Joe with his best young scientist award from BT Exact Technologies, it is really lovely he won and even more so that everyone in the group cheered him, which to me really highlighted how supportive of one another this group has become.

I was really pleased to hear from the parents how the sessions had helped the students in different ways, I especially liked how coding has helped one student get over his fear of maths. I could also see firsthand how this group has helped some of the students come out of the shell a bit, show off what they are capable of and begin to help others.

In September we will return, this group will be the "2nd years" it will be their challenge to help teach some of the basics and integrate the new group, thankfully I have complete faith in them to be able to do it.

A Sincere Thank You

Today was the last taught session of the Creative Computing Club pilot scheme we will meet again in two weeks for the exhibition. I just want to say this before the blog goes live to the general public, and that is thank you. Thank you O'Reilly, Rapid Electronics, YoYo Games, Love Electronics and Young Rewired State. Thank you to all of these wonderful people who helped fund the project, and thank you to Peoplefund.it and your excellent service. Thank you to all the Twitterers who tweeted their support. Thank you to Theo Clarke all the library staff at Chantry Library and to Anna Shaw and the staff at the Hawthorn's Children Centre. Thank you to all the participants and parents who took part.

We are going live with the blog now, as there was a mix up with the Bank Holiday / Queens Jubilee dates and we want people to know now. Additionally, I will be meeting hundreds of people over the coming weeks (teachers /parents/students/government) and we all agreed it would be best to let them know what we have been up to by sharing what we have done and exactly how we have done it through the resources that can be found here.

Thank you everyone for your time and support.

I hope you enjoy what you see.

Matthew C. Applegate / Pixelh8
@pixelh8 on Twitter

Creative Computing Club: Week 6 Circuit Bending & Sound

It is just the nature of circuit bending that sometimes you can get amazing results and sometimes you do not, and despite a lot of the toys that we brought in weren't very "circuit-bendable" due to their layout, we did some pretty cool stuff.  We still got on and learned things about sound and and how to automate toys through using the Arduino, we got a rather annoying "edutainment" toy to stutter and change pitch. We edited white noise from a circuit bent toy to come up with a bass and snare drum for a simple drum loop using Audacity and Sony Acid

Circuit Bending is very exploratory (that is why there are no resources to download for the session). It was a simple case of opening up the toys and poking different places with the ends of crocodile clips, while recording it all just in case something interesting happens (and sometimes only happens once), we have a good recording of it.

We now have two weeks off to plan our exhibition pieces for July 10th, 2012. It is an open to the public event where we will be discussing what we did and what we hope to do when we return for the full year Creative Computing Club course in September.

From September we will be going a lot more in depth with our projects, spending four weeks on a subject instead of one off sessions. We will be looking at Arduino, Processing, Game Maker, Minecraft EDU, Scratch, LEGO Mindstorms, .net Gadgeteer, HTML/Javascript and App Inventor, Sound, Animation and more, maybe we will see you there?

Creative Computing Club: Week 5 LEGO Mindstorms

Really impressed by the students today during the LEGO® Mindstorms® session, they took to it really quickly and were really confident in doing so. I had planned to teach them three examples, but only ended up teaching them two, I let them explore the Mindstorms kit and then provided them with a challenge to work out on their own, both teams successfully solved the challenge and had fun doing so. We got the kit to walk, detect colours, distance, play sounds and a combination of these.

You can download all the resources from this and the other sessions from here, you'll need the standard LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit for the examples using the "Alpha Rex" robot.

We also had quite a bit of good news this week, one student has been accepted on to a Degree and one has been nominated for Best Young Scientist award, so well done to both of them, very proud of of them.

Finally we talked about what we hoped to achieve in the year long program starting in September, hopefully adding .net Gadgeteer, Minecraft EDU, HTML/Javascript and App Inventor to the existing Processing, Game Maker, Arduino, LEGO Mindstorms, animation and sound modules.

I am going to set up Creative Computing Club as a Community Interest Company and that way we can get more funding to get more equipment and to do bigger projects in the year long curriculum.

Today was excellent, so I want to do more of the same.

Bonus: Scratch Introduction

Although we won't be covering Scratch in the 8 week pilot program, I thought I would do a short introduction to it as some of you might find it interesting. I have a made a simple JetPack style game the tutorial, graphics and sound are available from the resources page here and the full game is available from the Scratch website here.

Enjoy!

Creative Computing Club: Week 4 Arduino

Today was all about the Arduino, although it was difficult to get started due to driver installation issues on some of the machines, as soon as we did, the students were able to speed through it.  I was so pleased, as for a lot of them this was the first time a lot of them had ever done any electronics. They were extremely careful and respectful of the components, and followed the instructions perfectly.

I took them through a brief introduction to the parts; the LEDs, the breadboard, the resistors, potentiometers and the layout of the Arduinos it was light introduction, nothing too heavy.

Thankfully their experience with Processing last week helped them speed through the typing of the code and already new about things like the setup() and loop().

We started with the classic "Blink" tutorial and added more lights so we could then sequence them, we also gave the "pinouts" names so we could understand what the code was doing more easily.

We then added a variable "int time" so we could change the timing of the lights a lot easier across the sequence.


We were also able to add a potentiometer to change the speed at which the lights flashed, so we could interact with the Arduino in real time. 

All the resources from the session today can be found here. Sincerest of thanks to loveelectronics.co.uk for the donation of the Arduinos please check out their range of Arduino breakout boards and sensors and thanks to Rapid electronics for donating all of the components.

The Arduino I recommended you purchase is the Arduino Uno from Rapid Electronic and the book I recommended was Getting Started with Arduino which can be found here.

Creative Computing Club: Week 3 Processing

Today was hard work for the students but they coped well, not only did they have to learn Processing but all the terminology and concepts that goes along with computer programming. I admit I threw them in at the deep end, but they all managed to swim. The problems they were having were minor syntax errors; a missing semi-colon, a missing ")" not problems with the big concepts. They were able to take on board variables, arrays and even 2D arrays, it is quite easy when you put it in context of a game. A variable could be the Health Points or HP, an array could be used for the heroes inventory and a maze could be done using a 2D array. We even covered conditionals, functions and for loops.

I didn't want them to understand everything I just wanted to give them an overview of computer programming, these things like all crafts take time. I did however want to have a complete program or in this case a very small simple game, that way they could go home and have the whole program to tinker with. Because we did the Game Maker session first there were a lot of similarities to draw on, like variables and screen layouts.

I think it was a success, the proof of that however will come next week when I find what else they have gone on to do with Processing, like how they came back this week with Game Maker games with loads of cool features. This is just meant to be an introduction, the rest will be up to them. The book I recommended the look at to follow up the session with was "Getting Started with Processing A Quick, Hands-on Introduction"by Casey Reas and Ben Fry here.

Sadly today I was super busy running around making sure people were up to speed so I didn't get a chance to make any photos of the session today, but I promise I will next week when we start to play with the Arduinos.

We made a 2D maze game and so can you by downloading all the resources from the resource page here.

Game Maker Games Screenshots

It seems that a lot of the students have carried on with their games so I am going to post some of the images here. This one is from "Red and the Missing Keys". This game has portals!

If you have carried on with your game and have a screenshot you would like to share, please do.

Update:  May 30th, 2012
More screenshots are now coming in the games are still be developed and are looking great.

Another spectacular looking game really good use of depth. Excellent  work.

Update: July 10th, 2012
Brilliant and difficult game shown off at the exhibition.

 Lovely retro graphics on this one.

 Some really nice touches in this platform game
like quicksand.

 Wonderful open feel to this huge widescreen game.

 Wacky and wonderful concept to this game.

Creative Computing Club: Week 2 Game Maker

I am so pleased with the students today, not only because this was  an enormous and complex task, but it was their first session under my direction, and they did brilliantly. Admittedly one of the students had prior experience with Game Maker, and few of them had tried it before, but this time all of them left having learned how a basic platform game engine is put together. I really think they got a real sense of achievement from doing it.

I can't describe how happy they were when their characters started to come life, first we added gravity, then movement left and right, but it really got exciting when the characters jumped.

It was quite a daunting task for me, usually I tend to teach more game design than game making focusing on characters and artwork, this time it was all about using Game Maker to bring those design elements to life.

All of the resources for today's session are available here, for one on one sessions it usually takes around 60 minutes to go through it, for a group allow for 90 minutes. Obviously go through it first yourself otherwise it will take a lot more time. Next week we are learning coding with Processing so please download and install beforehand if possible.

Sincerest of thanks to my assistants Joe & Bradley for their help keeping everyone on track, to all those who took part and of course thanks to YoYo Games for providing the Creative Computing Club with a copy of Game Maker so I could teach with it.

If any students want to send me some screenshots of their game please do and I'll post them on here.

Creative Computing Club: Week 1 Introduction

Today was the start of something good and I really felt that especially after I had finished talking and got to see everyone else talking to one another. I started the session with a short 30 minute talk outline first what I have done, what I hope to achieve with these sessions and what I hope we as a group and individuals will go on to do afterwards. I talked about how we were funded through peoplefund.it and who has sponsored us with equipment.


I called it the "Opening Night" to borrow from the art world, this is a computing club, but it is very much geared towards getting people to put what they have created on display. I talked about the subjects we will be covering Game Maker, Processing, Arduino, LEGO Mindstorms, sound and animation. I also gave a demo of Processing and Augmented Reality which I also let the students try out.

I then stopped talking and started asking questions about what the group want out of these sessions, we also had cake at this point. It was great and the group already has a good feeling to it, the students were already beginning to talk to each other. I also got the students to introduce themselves, their computing experience and general interests. Minecraft appears to be very popular so I might have to contact them regarding using that in education.

Chris from Rapid Electronics also made it to drop off a load of much needed components, multi-meters a stationary, at which point we had a good rummage. Thanks to all at Rapid.

I made it very clear to the parents that they are welcome to attend all the sessions and to ask questions as I am very much a fan of families working together especially while learning.


I am really pleased with how it turned out and I really felt it important that the parents and students got to meet me before I start with the teaching. Even though my teaching style is fairly informal, I wanted to the introduction the me and the sessions to be really relaxed.  I wanted the students to know they are not being assessed, we are only here to learn and learn about the things they are interested in. One of the parents said their child was worried it would be like "more school", I think they are now aware of how different these sessions will be in comparison to a lot of assessment based activities. The ethos of the project is to provide a safe, friendly and supportive environment to either learn in groups or on their own, they can either join in on that weeks topic or continue on with an subject they are more interested in.

Next week we kick off with Game Maker, I will also be joined by two Degree students that I have taught on the UCS Games Design course. I think it good to have some of the degree students as they will be also able to explain their experiences as a Game Design student (and they are only a few years older than the students), which I think a few of these students will be interested in. Additionally it will provide the degree students with some teaching experience. So it is good news all round.

The plan

The 8 week course consists of one introductory session, six taught sessions and one exhibition session.
May 8th, 2012: Week One: Introduction
This session will mainly be an introductory session to me, my work and what I hope to achieve in the workshops. I also want to know what the students want to learn, the sessions are fun and informal and they can also be changed if the group raise an interest that hasn't been addressed. There are also a number of housekeeping things that need to be covered, emergency phone numbers, fire exits, CRB check, child safety, liability insurance and group blog video and photo waiver. There will be a few members of the press and a few introductory speakers at the event as it has certainly now got a lot of peoples attention.

May 15th, 2012: Week Two: Game Maker
We will be designing a platform game using Game Maker. The software is available for a PC or MAC from here http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker . You can buy the full version if you wish however the free demo is more than adequate to learn with at the moment. 

May 22nd, 2012: Week Three: Processing
This will be an introduction to computer programming using the Processing language developed by M.I.T. and is available here at http://processing.org/download/ . The software is free we will be creating a simple maze game while learning computational logic. 

May 29th, 2012: Week Four: Arduino
This session will be looking at the Arduino micro-controller, this will cover basic electronic as well as add to our previous sessions programming experience. You can buy an Arduino from many online outlets I recommend the Mega or Uno boards for the workshops. I have enough boards for the group to learn on however if you wish to continue at home after the session you will need to buy your own for your child. More information on these micro-controllers can be found here http://www.arduino.cc/ . 
June 5th, 2012: Week Five: 
(Cancelled due to Queen's Jubilee and Bank Holidays)

June 12th, 2012: Week Six: LEGO Mind-storms NXT

This session will be using the LEGO Mind-storms NXT model set delving deeper in to what computing and hardware can do. We will also be learning the visual programming language that comes with it to further our understanding of computational logic. You will need to purchase your own LEGO Mind-storms NXT set if you wish to continue creating with it at home. The sets can be found online through retailers, we will be using the educational set directly from LEGO.

June 19th, 2012: Week Seven: Sound and Circuit Bending 
 In this session we will be taking apart small musical electronic toys and adding additional electronic components to alter the sounds. I will provide screwdrivers, crocodile clips and potentiometers to help alter the sound however, you must bring your own toys to alter. Please do not spend a great deal of money on the toys that we take apart, £2 maximum from a local car boot sale is more than adequate. Also it should be noted that all toys being altered run the potential risk of being destroyed in the process. 

July 10th 2012: Week Eight: Exhibition

This will be an open session; friends, family and teachers are all invited to see what it is we have been learning, building and breaking. We have an open discussion about what we have done and where we want to go with it.

Any questions just ask,

Matthew C. Applegate / Pixelh8