Skip to main content

Young Coders Competition 2019



via GIPHY


Young Coders Competition 2019

The Young Coders Competition is a competition for primary schools aimed at helping teachers to become more confident with teaching coding skills. Any educator working with primary school aged children  (e.g. Teacher, Code Club Leader, etc) can run the competition whether they are familiar with coding or completely new to it. 

All the session planning is done for you so you can learn alongside your pupils. The resources include 
- 12 weeks of lesson planning for absolute beginners (children and teachers!) 
or 
- shorter 6 week version for those who already have a little experience with using Scratch. 

The resources can be used for computing lessons or to run within an after-school club.

It is open for children in years 4, 5 and 6 working in teams of 3 - 6 children. 

The aim is to create a short computer game using Scratch featuring super heroes who use their super powers for good.

As well as planning, the pack also includes:

·         Introductory assembly slides and script to launch the competition/club in your school
·         A3 poster to remind children about the competition
·         Educators FAQs with all key information you need close at hand
·         Student ‘cheat sheet’ with all the key rules on, so you don’t have to keep reminding them!




To register for the competition and access all the resources click on this link 
http://bit.ly/YoungCoders2019




The Young Coders competition is a collaboration between the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, Computing Subject within the University of Northampton and the STEM Ambassador Hub East Midlands.
By taking part in this competition, the children get a chance at becoming the Young Coders Crew 2019. Each child in the winning 3 teams will receive personalised certificates and all children will receive certificates of participation.
Competition Rules

·         You must be in years 4, 5 or 6 to enter.

·         You must have a team of 3 to 6 children to enter.

·         You must create a game in Scratch relating to the theme: Superheroes who use their powers for good.

·         Any violence, even for the greater good, will mean automatic disqualification.

·         After you have finished making your game, you must create a 2 minute video explaining what you did, how it works and how your game meets our marking criteria.

·         Videos must be submitted by Friday 23rd May

·         The judging criteria is as follows:

Functionality and innovation (50%)
Marketing (25%)
Community responsibility (25%)
Does the game work as intended?
Is the game easy to use?
Is the game imaginative?
Does the game include original and well-written code?
Aesthetics of the game – Does the game display correctly and look nice?
Creativity and design of your game’s name
Presentation of your game on the video
Is your game accessible for its target audience? I.e., is it suitable for the age range you built it for?
How does your game address the theme of Superheroes doing good?



All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Robot Software

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1  looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2  looked at social robots; Post 3  looked at a collection of small robots; Post 4 looked at further examples of small robots Robots, such as the forthcoming Buddy and JIBO, will be based some established open sourceand other technologies. Jibo will be based around various technologies including Electron and JavaScript (for more details see:  http://blog.jibo.com/2015/07/29/jibo-making-development-readily-accessible-to-all-developers/ ). Buddy is expected to be developed around tools for Unity3d, Arduino and OpenCV, and support Python, C++, C#, Java and JavaScript (for more details see http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/customize_your_buddy_companion_robot_with_this_software_development_kit ).  This post contin ues with some of the software being used with the smaller robots.  A number ...

Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour!

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...

Escape the Maze with a VR robot - Vex VR

You don't need to buy a robot to get programming a robot, now there are a range of free and relatively simple to start with robot simulators to play with. Three examples are listed below: - Make code for Lego EV3  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/05/programming-robots-virtually-3-lego-ev3.html   - i Robot simulator  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-2-irobot.html - Vex robotics Vexcode VR   https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-1-vexcode.html   It is the last one of these ( https://www.vexrobotics.com/vexcode-vr ) that is the focus of this post and return to hit, after an earlier discussion in  https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2020/04/programming-robots-virtually-1-vexcode.html   .  Two of the nice things about the package, apart from being free, are it uses a Scratch-like programming language and it provides a ...