Picademy Belfast 2018
Picademy Belfast 2018
Back in the middle of February, I heard the news that the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Picademy was making it’s first foray across the Irish Sea to come to Belfast & Dublin to deliver their 2 day session for educators. I fired off my application as quickly as I could and towards the end of March I received word that I was being offered a place and would be going (to the ball?). I should fire off a quick word of thanks to Vennetics for generously giving me the time off to attend.
What is a Picademy?
Picademy is an inspiring two day training event run for educators in the broadest sense, whether that is school teachers, youth leaders, or code club/coder dojo mentors. It is led by staff members from the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Learning Team. For our Picademy we were being trained by Caitlyn Merry, James Robinson, Lauren Hyams, Marc Scott, Martin O’Hanlon. Not only is the event free, but they also feed & water you for the two days.
The venue for our Picademy was the W5 Science Museum over at the Odyssey. I’ve been there loads of times before as it’s a great place to take the kids were they can have a great time exploring, learning and having fun, but it was the first time I’ve been there to make use of their training facilities and was very impressed!
The Big Day(s)
Blazing sunshine and hot weather are not things you normally associate with Belfast at this time of the year, but the Learning Team must have brought the weather with them. The day kicked off with introductions. An impressive bunch of educators were there, mostly teachers, both north & south of the border, as well as some from folks from Scotland & England, but there was also one lady who travelled across from Boston to take part! In addition to the school teachers, there was a healthy splash of Code Club & CoderDojo mentors (including 3 from the Dojo I champion for) and other activitist who help get kids engaged with coding & digital making.
After that there series of taster sessions, starting with controlling LEDs via Scratch on the Raspberry Pi before repeating the same with Python. We also had a session with the SenseHat, another with the Picamera, SonicPi and finally one with the ExplorerHat and motors. This final session was finished with a quick creation session where teams could make use of some crafting material to make a creation of their own. Our group made an awesome flying saucer which randomly lowered and raised itself :D
The second day had some interesting talks about the benefits of open education as well as presentations/pitches from Code Club & CoderDojo (with Rosa from the foundation travelling up to do that and also help teams out during the project phase) and PiNet (by Andrew Mulholland who some day may follow me on Twitter :D).
This was quickly followed by teams being formed and projects tackled for a 4 hour period. I was keen to try to see more of SonicPi so I joined up with a music team. As with all things, we were amazed at how quickly time went by doing the project and really struggled to get the various elements of the project brought together, but fair play to the group, we did just that and we were able to present a working demo of our Nursary Bot, which used PIR motion sensors to trigger different tunes to be played via an OCS bridge to Sonic Pi depending on the sensors triggered. We had stretch goals to change pitch/volume based on a distance sensor or to even mount the rig on a robot, but time didn’t allow that.
Before we were sent on our way, we each received our certifcates and awesome badges. Well earned by all who attended.
Conclusion
I wrote this article not to go deep into the details of the course, but just to show the amount of topics that were covered over the two days. Even as an experienced coder, I found the pace fast, but it needed to be otherwise we wouldn’t have been exposed to as many different digital making tools that are available out there for educators. The days flew by, not only because of the activities and the interesting presentations, but also because of the enthusiasm of the attendees and the humour of the mentors.
As a CoderDojo Champion, it gave me confidence that our team can definitely get our ninjas working with these digital tools to create some awesome projects and have even more fun at our dojo.
As an end note, like all other dojos, ours is run by volunteers and is free for everyone who attends. As such we don’t have a budget to bring in extra items such as arts & crafts materials or even some of the digital equipment that means more kids could make flying ufo cranes or countdown clocks or… If you would like to make a dontation of any kind, then please get in touch with CoderDojo Banbridge as we’d love to hear from you! I