Creative Commons License

All Creative Computer Club Resources created by Matthew C. Applegate are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please note that some of these resources also contain images of software that is protected by copyright and are used under special agreement with these software companies, they are therefore are not covered by the Creative Commons License. The text is free to download, use, edit and redistribute, the images are free to download and use as is, unfortunately they are not available to edit and redistribute. You can find the resources page here.←

Tuesday 10 July 2012

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.