Thursday 10 July 2014

More Minecraft Pi and a Robot!

After the success of yesterday and the fact that I had promised my Sixth Formers some time on the Raspberry Pis I let them loose on the set of Raspberry Pis that I had in my room. Considering there were less of them, they managed to make my room far more messy than my Year 10s - no idea how they managed that!

Anyway, after the quick intro about - "Hey, this is a Raspberry Pi" and answering the many questions that they had, we were off! All plugged in and ready to go, the brilliant student booklet for Minecraft Pi and Python on one screen and the Raspberry Pi on another. What did I discover from this lesson? That the Sixth Form like to use the TNT block and try to make things explode in Minecraft! There were lots of experiments with the Python coding going on, and lots of comments of why we had not used this to help them learn Python at the beginning of the year! All the students were much more willing to play with the code and try out new things with more confidence than just coding in Python. Excellent feedback from the students and some food for thought for next year.

As an aside to all this, the students really did enjoy it as many of them returned over the course of the day to get the Raspberry Pis back out to have another go, and also brought other students along to have a look.

During the afternoon, a box appeared in the department, and much to my joy it contained a load of electronics stuff that I had ordered. Gathering up the robot kit, I took it home to sit down and assemble it for tomorrow.


Here is the kit, a quick check that I had everything, loaded up the instructions and I was off. Forty minutes later after realising that I had put the wheels on the wrong side of the plate and I was finished! No batteries in the house so I will take it back to school tomorrow to fit the batteries and have a play with it! Awesomely easy and good fun to do!

No comments:

Post a Comment