In the summer of 2014, I tirelessly tried out various resources and blogged about them as I went along, but this summer, I wasn’t able to blog as much for one simple reason… This book. I spent most of my summer holiday trying out new resources and rewriting existing pieces to create a simple guideContinue reading “A Beginner’s Guide to Primary Coding”
Tag Archives: Computing
A Raspberry Pi Scratch Resource
Tomorrow I will be running a workshop for MozFest, a massive community event in London organised by Mozilla. Young Raspberry Pi enthusiast, PiNet creator and all round evil genius Andrew Mulholland somehow found himself organising a Rasperry Pi Zone at the event (I definitely had no involvement in this whatsoever) and so he coerced/bullied meContinue reading “A Raspberry Pi Scratch Resource”
A reflection on teaching coding
After another year at Pycon and really throwing myself into the coding community with my coding evenings and any other events that have caught my eye, I find myself reflecting on the purpose of teaching coding within a primary school. What do we hope to achieve by teaching complex languages like Python and Ruby? WhyContinue reading “A reflection on teaching coding”
Apologies for Silence
So, last year I spent my summer writing blog posts left right and centre and I have so many new products to try out and blog about, but I have a huge apology to make first… Basically, I started to write a short iBook about how to begin teaching primary coding which was aimed atContinue reading “Apologies for Silence”
Egham Jam & Picademy Round 2
As some of you may have noticed from my twitter, I’ve recently been invited to talk a couple of times about the things I’ve been doing since I attended Picademy last year. Firstly, I went to Egham Jam and met the lovely Albert Hickey, as well as a bunch of lovely and enthusiastic Pi people.Continue reading “Egham Jam & Picademy Round 2”
Learning to Solder – Zoo Kit
Last weekend I went to CamJam and I was very impressed with some small soldering kits that Hannah Mills had bought from The PiHut called Learn to Solder Zoo Badge. I was absolutely gutted that they had already sold out, but fortunately they had plenty in stock on their website. At only £2 each IContinue reading “Learning to Solder – Zoo Kit”
An Update
Earlier this week, following on from the success of my previous Coding Evenings, I launched CodingEvening.org to share my idea for free evenings for teachers to learn from experts about how to implement the coding aspect of the new computing curriculum. My reasoning behind this is that I’ve had a few other teachers ask meContinue reading “An Update”
Raspberry Pi – an idiots guide to installing Raspbian on a Mac
So, once again I need to admit my ignorance… A few weeks ago, my friend borrowed my SD card ‘to take an image’ and somehow corrupted it – I don’t know how and neither does he, but he did managed to back up all my files. So, I’ve not used my home Pi for aContinue reading “Raspberry Pi – an idiots guide to installing Raspbian on a Mac”
Sonic Pi
One of the things I was shown at Picademy, was Sonic Pi. At the time I thought it was a great resource, but too difficult for me. Since then, I was lucky enough to meet creator, Sam Aaron and persuade (ok..bully) him to visit my school and run an all day workshop about the software.Continue reading “Sonic Pi”
The PiStop
I’ve realised that I haven’t yet written a blog post about my favourite bit of kit for the Raspberry Pi, the PiStop by 4Tronix. So first lets talk about why I like it so much then I’ll talk through a demo of using it. Earlier in this blog, I talked about the CamJam EduKit andContinue reading “The PiStop”