Sunday 17 February 2019

Young Coders Competition 2019



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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

Friday 25 January 2019

Scratch speaking German, French, Spanish.....

Scratch 3 the gift that keeps on giving; including the new extensions are Text to Speech and Translate; Text to speech - does as the name suggests, turns typed in phrases into speech via Amazon Web Services. Translate using Google (and I assume Google Translate?) to translate text between different languages.




As an experiment, I waned to play with clapping my hands, have Scratch the Cat ask me to enter a phrase and then convert that into French, German and Spanish with different voices. The resulting code is shown below.



It is all started by a loud noise like a hand clap. The two extensions have been added to the blocks and are ready to go. The voice is initially set to Alto and the text-speech block has had the phrase "Please enter a phrase" typed in and says this. The ask block has the same question permanently set and the answer produced gets feed into the translations. 

The remaining blocks do essentially the same thing
- change the voice;
- take the phrase typed in (via answer) and convert to the language of choice;
- wait a second.


It is great fun, I am not sure all the languages work but what is there is cool to play with. In an ideal world instead of typing the phrase it would be great to just say the phrase...maybe in the future. 

The code is available at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/282312832/.



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

Thursday 3 January 2019

Scratch and web-cams in Scratch 3

Scratch 3 was launched on 2nd January 2019, so I wanted to know would Webcams still work with Scratch 3 as it did with Scratch 2. For example, in a previous post Scratch, webcams, cats and explosions the cat (Scratch) moved across the screen and a button burst when the object moved in the camera onto it. 



Can the same thing be done in Scratch 3? The short answer is yes, but it is done slightly differently.

The first change the video capture is not there in the blocks automatically; but is an extension that needs to be added. First, you need to add the extension blocks for video sensing. Go to the little icon at the bottom left of the screen (as shown below) this takes you to the extensions menu.


Next, find the Video Sensing option and selected. The webcam, if enabled, with start automatically.

A video sensing set of blocks is now in the list of block options. 

The rest is very similar to doing this in Scratch 2.

Moving Scratch: The code below moves the cat backwards and forwards depending on whether the object is moving left to right on the screen, or not.


The bursting bubble is done with the code below. When the object in the camera is on the button; make a popping noise, switch to an image (costume) that of a burst button, wait 1 second and return to the whole button image.

The code is available at https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/276892758/ please feel free to improve it and let me know. 



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

ChatGPT, Data Scientist - fitting it a bit

This is a second post about using ChatGPT to do some data analysis. In the first looked at using it to some basic statistics  https://robots...