How Can We Help?
This week our school groups will be moving online for the foreseeable future and we look forward to continuing the great work everyone has been doing. Unfortunately due to the nature of some of the other workshops, it just wouldn’t be feasible hosting them online and I just want to thank the children and parents for being so understanding during this time.
As a parent myself, I am finding all the offers of remote learning and digital resources in all topics a little overwhelming at the moment, so First Coding has been looking at other ways to help.
We have been lending out our laptops to allow families to continue their schooling remotely after the recent closure of schools.
With a little more time on their hands, our older students are offering to help Salisbury independent businesses with a variety of skills such as setting up ecommerce on shops’ websites to designing posters. We couldn’t be more prouder of them and what a great way to work on their portfolio.
TED Talks come to Salisbury
Salisbury recently hosted its first TEDx event and First Coding made an appearance talking about overcoming obstacles through creative coding. Click on the video below to watch the talk.
Salisbury Minecraft – The Return
First Coding is very pleased to announce that another of our Minecraft events to build a virtual Salisbury will be taking place in the Arts Centre as part of Wiltshire Creative’s Takeover Festival. More details to follow shortly.
TEDx Salisbury
Last night Salisbury’s Arts Centre played host to a very special event, the city’s first ever TEDx talks. The theme of the evening was all about crossing boundaries with a set comprising of four guest speakers and two musicians. I was very flattered to have been selected as one of those speakers.
I thought long and hard about the topic of my talk and in the end went with something very personal to me, dealing with self doubt when artists and creatives showcase their work. I called it Connecting the Dots Differently and is all about the benefits of stepping outside your comfort zone. The video of my talk should be available to watch on the TED platform soon.
I remember the tickets selling out rather quickly but the popularity of the event wasn’t realised until I stepped out onto the red spot to be greeted by the audience. To be the first speaker at the very first event was a huge privilege, if not a little scary but once I settled into the talk and spoke about the many paths my creative coding projects have led me down, it all felt strangely natural. I think part of that is down to teaching and running classes both in schools and out.
Afterwards, the audience were encouraged to chat with all the speakers and I really enjoyed meeting everyone last night. There are so many kind and creative people who came out to see us, there was a lovely positive vibe about the whole event. To the people who told me they were going to give coding a try for the first time – go for it! To the others who said they never post about their passion projects through fear of rejection but are going to give it a shot after attending this event, you are awesome in so many ways.
I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped organise the TEDx Salisbury event. They were all volunteers, giving up their own free time to help make something magical and get the people of Salisbury sharing and discussing ideas.
My chatbot projects featured heavily in my talk, highlighting the many uses for a simple project born out of boredom a couple of years ago. There is now a simplified version of Cass online for people to play with, pull apart and add their own features if they wish to. The online version along with the code and Android download can be found here. I would love it if people were to get in touch in a few weeks time to share with me their ideas.
Build and Play Workshops
The final half term Build and Play workshop took place today. All the groups have been amazing, but today’s class were super competitive. They got to build their own racing car games in Scratch before competing for prizes at the end.
Half Term Code Cracking
If you were one of the pupils who made their own Caesar cipher apps last term, you maybe interested to see this post from the Science Museum. Can you crack it? If you can solve it, then take what you’ve learnt and try and make your cipher more robust. Good luck!
Advanced Scratch Course Starting in March
First Coding will be running another of its popular workshops. This course is designed for children who are already confident with working with Scratch and who would like to explore further possibilities with the things they make. This is a four week Saturday afternoon course starting on 14th March, 2.30pm – 3.30pm. The cost of this course is £80 per pupil for the four weeks.
To book, please email hello@firstcoding.co.uk
Read All About It!!!
Keep an eye out for First Coding’s Minecraft project in the papers. We’ve set everyone the challenge to build the whole of Salisbury in a virtual world and there will be more exciting news about future events with Wiltshire Creative happening soon.
A short video of the progress the children made back in December can be seen below. Well done to everyone involved.
New Coding Clubs
Three new coding clubs kick off this week. The pupils will be learning how to code their own text adventure games in Python. These games were a huge part of most people’s childhood and if you would like to learn more about them then I would recommend books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Here are my only surviving copies from the 80s and 90s.
