So today was divided in to four activities the first three were about QR Codes. The first activity was a short 15 minute talk about how QR Codes work, how they are read by machines and error correction. The second part was getting the students to hide a secret message in a QR Code that they could take home, and the third was getting the students to colour in A4 size QR Codes with a giant question mark below it and to hide around the school, just to get people asking about them (the code sent anybody who scanned them to the school website). It was really good fun and the students definitely learned how they worked as I quizzed them on it all afterwards. The last thirty minutes was spent planning out more of their Augmented Reality games which we will reveal in a couple of weeks. You can download the talk as a .pdf file here. We are covering QR Codes, AR, pattern recognition and facial recognition in this series of workshops. Any questions just ask me twitter @pixelh8 .

I was asked to give a talk at Horizons: A Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the ZX Spectrum at the BFI in London. The talk was about my career which started with coding on the ZX Spectrum,  how it has lead me back to the classroom and the importance of teaching children to code and be creative with technology. Other speakers included Rupert Goodwins, and Eben and Liz Upton of the Raspberry Pi foundation. It was good to see Rupert Goodwins again (I didn’t realise how involved he was with Sinclair) and to meet the people behind the Raspberry Pi, I look forward to using it in teaching in the future. It was a great event organised by Imperica so well done to them and thanks to all those who attended and all of the nice tweets.

Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Photo by PeriniNetworks used under a Creative Commons License.

So today was the start of something new for both me and the students, Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality or (AR) “is is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. ” (Wikipedia). In short the phone or computer adds pictures or information to a live image, augmenting it. I was a bit apprehensive about doing this workshop as I had never run it before, I have done loads of work with the age range which in this case was 9-year-olds but you never know if they are going to get it or not. They did, they really did. I started the session explaining it in words only, then I showed them a few pictures of existing apps that use AR, and then revealed to them just how wonderful it is by running some demos on the iPad 2. They were blown away, not only by the AR but by the fact they over the next 5 weeks would be harnessing this system to bring their ideas to life. AR can be a tricky subject to get your head around but we managed and the 12 students, divided in to four groups of three have already set about planning out their ideas for their augmented reality projects. We have started to talk about how AR markers work, we are also learning about QR Codes (as shown in the picture), facial and object recognition software and next session they will be designing their own QR Codes to act as markers for their games.

The head of the school popped by to see how it was all going and asked one of the students who simply replied that it was “Awesome”, so I think they are enjoying working with AR.

As I mentioned I was a bit apprehensive about running the project, as I myself am new to the subject and I needed to know I could do it, before they put forward their ideas. I had also pre-made some ideas just in case the concept proved too much for them to take on board, but they really weren’t necessary. I can save those Ideas for another time. I am now really pleased and really excited about the project and can’t wait to see how they progress next week.

I got to go back to the British Museum today (first visit) to teach game designing, however this time we ran it slightly different. Firstly we got families to organise themselves as companies/groups, which was wonderful to see parents and sometimes grandparents get involved in the decision making of the games. Secondly I was able to use my recent experience of creating OCARBOT to help teach them them stages I went through to make a game. Thirdly I taught it from my iPad so I was able to show them OCARBOT in action instead of a just a video of it (I think I will do this for all talks in the future). Good fun was had by all in the two SOLD OUT and fully attended courses, I hope they all enjoyed their experience planning out a video game and hope they will begin to look at video games in a different way. Many thanks to the excellent support staff at the British Museum for their help, I look forward to returning in the future.

Today was the day the kids got to see the three web apps they designed , I am really pleased with how they all turned out and the kids were too. It is really nice to see something they designed running on a bang-up-to-date iPad, (imagine being nine and already have your first web app out). We naturally spent the first twenty minutes of the session playing through all the apps, they were too excited to do anything else, we quickly followed this with short written reviews and comments about each others games and now that they have finished, what if anything they would have done differently. We then moved on to designing a print logo for each game, trying to encapsulate as much of the game in just the logo alone. At the end of the session they were allowed to return to their apps for 10 minutes as they had worked so very hard.

“Electric Zombie Inc.” has released “Warfare: Revenge of Germany” here, “Monkey Business” has released  “Animal Time” here and finally “Rainbow Buddies” released “Dress Up Pets” here. They will only be up for a short period of time as already they have been pushing my server to its limits. We may be tweaking them a bit soon as well, you’ll soon be able to control “W:ROG” with keys as well as the touchscreen and “Animal Time” may get a few more levels too.  I am really pleased I got to do this project with Springfield Junior School and the fact they can access it in both a browser and iPad is amazing. So just to recap 12, 9-year-olds spent two hours a week with me for five weeks (10 hours total, 8 hours designing, discussing, drawing, animating and brainstorming and 2 hours of playing and discussion today) and I think they did a pretty good job of it too. I really must thank YoYo Games again for their support and for making Game Maker HTML 5 so useful. Let us know what you think of the games @pixelh8 on twitter.

I am pleased to announce that the Creative Computing Club has managed to successfully crowdsource £1010 pounds in funding through Peoplefund.it. I am so pleased to be able to run these free workshops. The workshops aimed at 12 to 16-year-olds will take place at Hawthorn Children’s Centre, Chantry Library in Ipswich on Tuesdays 4pm til 5:30pm.

The first aim of the project is to teach creative computing; programming, basic electronics, animation, music, sound and much more in a safe, friendly and informal environment. We now have the money to afford enough; Arduinos, cables, components, cameras for animation, software, paper, pencils, a LEGO Mindstorms kit, memory sticks, safety goggles and more. This is all thanks to the people who donated here, all the people who tweeted, forwarded emails, mentioned it to a friend and Peoplefund.it for being so supportive of the project. I would also like to thank YoYoGames for their excellent Game Maker software, Rapid Electronics for it donation of electronic components and equipment, and O’Reilly Media for their amazing books and MAKE magazines, thank you so much. Additionally I would like to thank Theo Clarke the manager of Chantry Library for his enthusiasm and support of the project, Anna Shaw the manager of the Children’s Centre for allowing us use of the room and Suffolk STEMNET for spreading the word.

The initial course will run for 8 weeks, an introductory week, 6 weeks of different subjects and then an exhibition of the different projects the students have done. After this I will conduct a review and hopefully be able to tun the project indefinitely with a year long rolling course structure, featuring special sessions for both older and younger participants to get involved.

The second aim of the project is to produce high quality and free teaching resources for IT/ICT teachers to use, with supporting pictures, diagrams, blogs (by both the students and myself), audio recordings, videos and anecdotes taken directly from the sessions. These resources will be initially given to the sponsors of the project as a reward for their support and then be made public after the 8 week course has run. IT/ICT (or whatever you call it) is changing, I hope these resources will help some teachers, parents and individuals get involved in creative computing . I really enjoy teaching people how to make things, and the 12 to 16-year-old age range was vital to my development as an artist, I am truly grateful to be able to give something back to the local community which may in turn benefit others.

The Creative Computing Club isn’t just going to be a computing club, it is going to be an amazing computing club and this is all down to your support of the project. Thank you.

Matthew C. Applegate / Pixelh8

Recently I was asked to help out at Parkside School in Ipswich to help the students make a video game. “Parkside provides an alternative learning environment for students, at Key Stage 4, who have emotional difficulties, and other health problems, which prevent them from accessing mainstream education.” It was great fun and for many it was an eye opener. The school does a great many excellent and varied ICT activities but this is one of the first in which they were actively encouraged to be a bit “silly” in ICT. The excellent ICT teacher they has has been running several different projects but this time I was in charge of helping them shape their ideas in to a platform video game and it was wonderful to see although none of them had any prior experience in making games they were able to focus and create interesting ideas. We are running it in two sessions as the students are much older than the normal age range I work with and have been getting on with the work a lot quicker. I look forward to going back in a few weeks time and seeing what else they have created, and to help them bring their video game ideas to life.

So today was the final session where the students could add things to their games and it was amazing to hear how organized they were. I said at the start of the session that they had one and a half hours left to draw everything they need, so they didn’t rush to get started with the computers they first discussed “priorities”. They had a chat in their groups about what stage everything was at and what things were more or less important if they get done or not. It was amazing to see. As you can see the graphics are stunning and I genuinely mean that, the games are really well planned out, with a lot of attention to detail.

It was good session and although they are a little sad that they won’t see me again for two weeks they are happy that when I return they will be able to play on their web apps / games, and hopefully you will to. So I have two weeks to make three simple web apps using all of their assets, design guides and flow charts.

This weeks session was all about the assets the apps are to have, the backgrounds, the buttons, the characters, so it was a lot of computer graphics based stuff. It was amazing to see how skilled the students were at using different graphics software, bearing in mind that they are only 8 t 9-years-old. I can confirm that the different “companies” or groups have their names and debut title names ready, and they are as follows. “Electric Zombie Inc.” will be releasing “Warfare: Revenge of Germany”, “Monkey Business” will be releasing “Animal Time” and finally “Rainbow Buddies” will be releasing “Dress Up Pets”. Three very different apps and groups. One group all girls, one group all boys and the last group has two of each. I have to say some of the character designs are so good I could actually see them being used in a “commercial” game, absolutely brilliant. Our last session will be this Thursday after which I will code the apps with all their ideas and reveal it to them on the 12th of April. The games should go live to the public shortly after that, pending a child safety review.

So today was the second session with the private student (see first blog). We finished up TIC TAC TOE and you can play it online here, it includes the source code with full code and graphics here in a zip file. It was good fun to finish and upload it, it always gives you a sense of achievement to do so.

We finished it pretty early in the session so we moved on to programming the Arduino which uses a similar syntax/environment to Processing. We progressed through the “Blink” and “Button” tutorials covering basic electronics, resistors, variable resistors, LEDS and more.

In the end we had three LEDs that had several different lighting modes that could be cycled through by the press of the button. It was nice to show him how to do one setup and then ask him how to do the next, he is very keen to learn, he worked fast and answered the question correctly. I know he is learning, as even in some of the more difficult situations in the code he was able to elaborate on it himself correctly. I always find people learn much better when it is something they want to learn, so he’ll be fine.

I think it has been useful for both of us as I usually teach either younger children or degree level students it is always good to know how much a young person in that age range can take on, in one day. I feel we both achieved and learned something today which is always a nice thing, he hes gone home with some components and an Arduino and has already started to tinker. Who knows what he will ask to learn about next time I teach him.