Game designers assemble! You could be an award winner game designer.
This is First Coding’s most exciting workshop yet! Join our 6 week game design workshop and build a game to enter into next year’s prestigious BAFTA Young Game Designer Awards. The sessions will help you refine your ideas, getting them ready for submission to the Design Awards.
To join in, you should be familiar with Scratch, between 11 & 15 years old and have bucket loads of enthusiasm.
First Coding is making a series of Salisbury themed games that will help raise money for charity in the new year. The second game, Coffee Shop Simulator is finished and it featured on local radio this week. Take a listen.
First Coding will be running the popular creative Christmas Coding Workshop next month for 7 to 11 year olds. Using Scratch, we’ll be learning how to make our own animated cracker joke generators. All our workshops are currently being hosted online via Zoom.
First Coding is very pleased to announce that we’ll be hosting coding classes on the Satchel platform. Satchel are the people behind Show Your Homework, something that a number of pupils and parents might be familiar with.
First Coding’s first class was on game design with the key takeaways being as follows:
How to push yourself creatively when coding.
The best approach to starting a portfolio of work.
Ways to get involved with the game dev community and get your game noticed
If you’re interested, the class can be viewed here.
First Coding is very pleased to announce that we’ll be starting our popular after school coding club at Bishop Wordsworth’s School after the half term break. The club went online during lock down which was great but nothing quite beats having everyone in the classroom creating together.
First Coding would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped test the Micro:bit kits we’re developing. Whether you tested the kits to destruction, tried to find bugs in the code or were just happy to receive a parcel to check that the kits survived the journey in the post, thank you so much!
After a summer of refining ideas and reworking code, we have a couple of really nice kit designs that will shortly be going into production. The idea was to develop a case for the BBC Micro:bit that could then have accessories fitted to it. The first is a Morse code kit, a fun little kit that includes a Morse code key to attach to your Micro:bit case as well as the Python code to allow you to tap out your own secret messages. All kits come with fully illustrated instructions and you’re encouraged to play with the code to make it your own.
The second kit to go into production is the Micro:bit Code Breaker kit. In our attempt to create an uncrackable code, we’ve incorporated some of the features into the code for this kit, ensure that any encoded secret messages you send don’t run the risk of being worked out.
It has been a very long road getting here, one which has taught us a great deal about product development. The products have gone through a number of versions and as a result there is a huge collection of prototypes. We’ll have to think of a good idea that puts them to good use.
You can hear the interview that went out on this morning’s Breakfast Show below. In it I talk about the plans we have to build a series f games in time for Christmas. I can’t believe how much interest it generated, they were even running a phone-in to see what ideas people can come up with. Proof that even the silliest of games can get noticed at times!
Listeners to BBC Radio Wiltshire will be able to hear all about some of the great projects coming out of First Coding tomorrow morning. Hopefully the projects featured will demonstrate that even the most simplest of ideas can often be the most fun and creative. The game design idea that is being launched shortly is also revealed as we plan for a creative Christmas. I’ve been told the interview will be aired on the Breakfast Show tomorrow morning. The link will also be posted when it’s made available.
A huge thank you to everyone who entered the Summer Scratch Coding Competition. Here we reveal the winner as well as a few mentions of projects that really impressed us – Well done to all!
First Coding has made the difficult decision to close our classrooms in central Salisbury due to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions. The First Coding rooms have seen some great events take place since we relocated there. From holiday coding workshops and competitions to hosting bigger events including building Salisbury in Minecraft and producing animations that were reviewed by Aardman! The creative space will be greatly missed and we’ll be back holding our face-to-face classes as soon as we can. In the meantime, all workshops and events will be hosted online via Zoom for the foreseeable future.
