Our robotic caterpillar mascot needed a little operation today: its middle horizontal servo had been acting up in recent weeks, so I replaced it. I’m happy to report it’s made a full recovery!
Later today we’re visiting Chermside library (during their renovation they’re currently located at North Regional Business Centre, 960 Gympie Road, opposite the Westfield Chermside Shopping Centre).
We’ll also be demonstrating the Mirobot drawing turtles from our popular Robotics Program.
I’m not a great fan of flow-charts when it comes to programming, but I reckon this one with the lyrics of the classic Beatles song Hey Jude is pretty cool: (click on the image to see it at full size)
If you like that kind of geeky fun… a few years ago there was a Twitter trend #songsincode (links to the archive) in which thousands of people captured the title of a song using a bit of (pseudo-)code (of whatever programming language), of course also bound by Twitter’s 140 character message limit.
It saw crafty things like
substring("the tiger",6,1)
(by @antallan),
baabaa=new sheep{color:black};echo(baabaa.hasWool?string.format("{0}!\n{0}, {1} bags full","Yes Sir",baa.bags.count):"No");
(by @web_bod) and many many more.
Horays! Arjen and Claire are both selected to speak at the Open Source Developers’ Conference 2015, scheduled for 27-29 October in beautiful Hobart, Tasmania:
OSDC is a great conference, low cost (about $300 including lunches and the conference dinner!) with a friendly, knowledgeable and engaging group of people and sessions. Always enjoyable and highly educational.
We hear that OSDC registration has been opened, the draft schedule is up and limited earlybird tickets are available.
Of course we’ll bring along caterpillar (he hasn’t travelled outside QLD yet), and assorted other goodies and gadgets for everybody to see and explore.
I’ve written earlier that my first “real” computer was the Acorn BBC Micro. I did have a Sinclair ZX80 a bit before then, but that little machine only had 1KB of RAM and a very shabby flat touch keyboard. The Acorn BBC had a real properly clicky keyboard, vastly more RAM (32KB 😉 and twice the CPU speed as well as many more options for attaching devices and hacking around in both hardware and software space. I didn’t quite realise all that, but I knew I wanted one and it was an amazing experience to play with and learn from.
In 1984 a new game came out, Elite. Very different from the other stuff that had been around. It was 3D, in space, and didn’t have the typical “3 lives, a few challenges, and N minutes of game play”. In the video below, BBC’s Peter Snow visits the Elite authors David Braben and Ian Bell, to explore how the game was developed. It’s a most interesting story. I didn’t know the 3D space radar screen had been a last minute addition. Indeed it turned out to be one of the key features!
The video doesn’t mention that many aspects of Elite were based on the Classic Traveller RPG (Role Playing Game), including ship designs and trading approach. The authors did acknowledge this elsewhere. It’s fine, just good to know about heritage and influences.
Of course the gaming world has moved on, itself influenced in a major way by Elite. The game Elite itself is also still around, with David Braben most recently developing Elite: Dangerous.
Elite taught interesting lessons for game developers, which are sometimes forgotten today. It’s not all about the fancy graphics, the game play experience is much more than that (and actually not necessarily about the graphics at all). Size matters, even today – inevitably, if you have load more data from disk, it’s slightly slower. So if you’re more space efficient, the broader game will appear snappier: more responsive and faster.
“Tight code” and design is not typically something programmers focus on now, but it’s a real asset. It requires proper understanding of a system, down the software layers into the hardware. It’s worthwhile, even if you’re not planning on writing the next amazing video game. I don’t like to delve into the common Intel based PCs as they’re overly complex and really quite messy. But looking at Arduino micro-controller environments is entirely feasible, and also Raspberry Pi. And that’s also the kind of understanding that we work on in our OpenSTEM workshops and programs for school classes.
Mark Pesce writes about kids solving real world problems.
They create code (programming) but these days it’s not always necessarily about that. I think that makes sense. When I got into coding, it was quite hard to solve real world problems that way or interface with the real world. It’s actually just a reflection of where the hardware and related infrastructure was at – at that time.
Back then kids (or any people) explored computers and programming as a target in itself, not as a tool to be used. Obviously it was still a tool, but the primary use case was clearly different for those explorers (of which I was one).
Bebras is an international initiative whose goal is to promote computational thinking for teachers and students (ages 8-17 / school years 3-12). Bebras is aligned with and supports the new Australian Digital Technologies Curriculum. Bebras Australia is run by NICTA under the Digital Careers program, funded by the Australian Government as represented by the Department of Communications.
The Bebras Australia Computational Thinking Challenge 2015 is from 7 to 18th September 2015. It’s completely free and looks cool (I couldn’t resist and did a couple of the challenges – fun!)
Teachers can register and get things organised now (visit download the coordinators handbook to learn how to set up your students in the competition server. You must also obtain a parental consent form for each student.)
Anyone can go to the Bebras challenge site and play with last year’s challenges already to get a feel for what it’s like.
My grade 4 son played this with me a few times, his feedback was it was too easy but fun,…
Brad