Be Successful Learning Scratch

Blog, Events, Game Design, Scratch

Scratch gets a bad press with its colourful blocks and cartoon sprites, people automatically assume that it’s intended for just primary school learners, when it so isn’t. There is so much to learn and achieve through the platform. So to prove a point, First Coding entered a game built using Scratch into a game dev competition. Pitched against other game developers who were using the likes of Unity and other engines to build their creations, despite feeling like a little fish in a big pond, this little Scratch game came third overall!

Here were some of the comments the game received from other developers:

The voting period was kept open for a week after the competition had finished, giving people plenty of time to play all the games that had been entered. The final result for our entry was as follows:

App Building Competition

App Design, Blog, Events,

Children who have previously attended our Android App Building workshops may be pleased to hear that the team over at App Inventor (the platform we use to build our apps) will shortly be running their Appathon 2021 app building competition for all ages.

The theme of the competition is to design and make an app that helps someone in need or makes a difference to the community. I know from running these workshops that pupils have a great imagination and I have no doubt they could come up with some creative ideas for this contest.

If you’re interested, or know someone who might, the link to the competition is here: https://appathon.appinventor.mit.edu . Registration opens on the 1st of June with the competition running between the 18th and 31st June.

Good Luck!

The Vikings Are Coming!

Blog, Scratch,

This term’s Younger Coders’ courses are centred around quizzes where children have to build a series of questions and work out whether the answers are correct or not. Here is a great example of one of the projects, it’s a quiz about Vikings. The more questions the player gets correct, the more the quiz master starts to resemble a Viking. Great work, we love it!

Exciting News

Blog, Events, Ideas, ,

It has been a busy time for First Coding with our GCSE Computer Science tuition sessions proving popular but we’re also going to be involved in a number of really exciting projects in and around Salisbury.

There are plans to get involved with a local creative hub based in the city, as well as collaborations with local independent business and more exciting school clubs to come. In the meantime, it would be nice also post about inspirational projects, so I’m kicking things off with my TED talk about the benefits of creative coding from last year.

 

BWS Computer Club

Blog, Schools

After running the after school clubs online, it was nice to start this recent coding club at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in person. The club went online during lock down which was great but nothing quite beats having everyone in the classroom creating together.