What resources to get if starting a maker space/coderdojo for ages 9- 12

[Sinead Herlihy]

Hello everybody,
Lots of people online at the moment so would love some advice.
Was gonna start a coderdojo style after school club in my school- is there anything besides laptops, good wifi etc that our school should/could purchase like ...lego or electronics etc? Was gonna buy a few makey makey kits....anyone have any other suggestions?
Thanks :-)

[Stephen Howell]

Hi Sinead,

If aiming for the coding end of the CoderDojo spectrum I wouldn't get any cool robotics gadgets _yet_.

Start with an average laptop with Scratch, build up coding to whatever level you and they are comfortable with.

Then offer them the choice of more coding or maybe some robotics/electronics.

If the choose the later, then introduce Lego Mindstorms (or whatever the latest incarnation is), Makey Makey and

work up to Arduino, Raspberry PI etc.

If they want more coding, or you just want to have some fun with gadgets and coding, a Kinect (sans xbox) is around 100 euro second hand

and my software to program it from Scratch is free: http://scratch.saorog.com

Alternatively, the Leap Motion controller (www.leapmotion.com) is very cool and goes on sale in May.

I have also developed software to control it in Scratch, but it's not released yet.

Regards,

Stephen

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[Sinead Herlihy]

Cool thanks Stephen,

Have been watching that video u did with the kinect - v. Cool. I suppose coz i ve only recently gotten into this for some reason i am forgetting the amt of time even scratch alone will take to get going not to mind anything else... I mean its so much fun/endless in itself !! Thats great advice thanks- wud be anxious also to purchase soon enough though before there are budget cuts!!

[Power]

I picked up a new Kinect for €50 in Harvey Normans a while back, they are selling them for €75 at the moment. Ardunio Kits are flexible and cheap - we bought them for about €35 a kit including breadboards, leds, jumper cables and switches. You can do no a nice intro with these - traffic light programming etc. 

[Geraldine Kelleher]

Is there an adapter which will allow you connect the kinnect into pc via usb ?

[Stephen Howell]

Hi,

All Kinects that are sold separately to the Xboxes already have the connector. If your Kinect has an electricity plug, that's the (combined) one. I think Amazon sells the connector for about a tenner.

Regards,

Stephen

[Eugene Eichelberger]

I think it is important to not get hung up on shiny equipment. A few people at Google have come up with computer science curriculum that doesn't require a computer: http://www.csunplugged.org/

These are fun activities and the absolute required concepts needed to figure out how to build software. At 9 - 12 their keyboard skills and vocabulary are limiting how much they can absorb and perform. These activities make the lesson engaging and help to build a team mentality before getting lost behind the screen.

-Eugene

[Power]

You NEED equipment for an after school computer club. Kids want to have fun and make stuff. Sure CSUnplugged is great for theory but thats not going tool make an engaging after school group. You wouldn't have after school rugby where students concentrate on tactics and never take to the field!

A great project to start is to recondition school or parent donated hardware. Get Linux mint or Ubuntu ( use cinnemon not unity on older machines) and you have a powerful
Dev machine a a sense of achievement from the students involved. Failing that raspberry PiS can be had for under 50 delivered.

[Keith Rowe]

There is a small kit available from genie.org which allows the student to build a small circuit board and then create and download their own program into it to make it run

Keith

Sent from my iPhone

[Sinead Herlihy]

Hi!
Thanks to all of you who took the time to reply- i have followed and will continue follow all of your advice re: the after school club. All your ideas were so helpful. The bom approved the project and have a bit of money to spare- thanks for the ubuntu idea - @conpower, have just been replying to one of ur tweets not realising that it was you had planted the idea in my head in the first place (replacing old windows pc with ubuntu OS) would ve never tried it otherwise.
Am really looking forward to starting- am only regretting the fact that i am in a boys school- no hope of any coder divas coming my way any time soon but we ll see...
All the best
Sinead

[Power]

If it's after school why not see if a teacher and students from the girls school would like to come down? Could be a good opportunity to collaborate most schools have a techie or two!

[Sinead Herlihy]

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