On Wednesday, Aber Robotics Club put on a day of coding, gaming and robotics in Old College. We ran two workshops: one on Minecraft, and one on Mindstorms (lego robots). Each had about 30 kids in, and the aim was to have a techy day that taught attendees something new, but that was also fun: it was a summer holiday workshop after all.
In the Mindstorms lego robots workshop we did a mixture of activities – most of which I’ve blogged about before. We did the “program a humanoid robot” exercise, where we get kids to write down programs for their parents (who end up blindfold). We did the “steer a lego robot around a track” using remote control. And we did the “customise your lego robot then have a bit of a fight” Robot Wars style event to finish. These are all tried and tested activities which work really well together and made for a good day, with enough content and learning, and enough fun and chaos too.
We had also had a visit and a talk from Laurence Tyler of Aberystwyth Computer Science, who works in our space robotics group. He talked about robots in space, mars rovers, sattellites, Philae, and all sorts of other cool stuff. He brought along Blodwen, our scale model of the ExoMars lander, and explained how stuff made in Aberystwyth is actually going to end up on Mars. The kids asked all sorts of excellent questions and listened attentively throughout, which was great.
Over in the Minecraft room, the aim was to try and build bits of the Old College building colaboratively. There was apparently quite a bit of destruction as well as construction, but when I popped in at lunchtime I saw some fairly recognisable college parts so they all managed to get something built in the end.
In the afternoon, the Minecraft crew had an introduction to programming in Minecraft, starting with a demo of Jim Finnis’s castle generation software. Which opened quite a few eyes, and got a big “whoa!” from the audience: it’s a super piece of code that just builds amazing castles programmatically. One of the key ideas you have to get in order to code in Minecraft is the idea of a 3D coordinate system (x,y and z): I’m not sure that many of the kids had done that before so there was quite a steep learning curve.
We’ll be revisiting these workshops in the next couple of weeks to see what went well and what needs to be worked on: the kids really liked them both. The minecraft one has more of a setup overhead, as we needed to get hold of enough computers (30 Raspberry Pis, in the end) and sort out networking, a server, and so on. The lego robots workshop is a more polished event now (we’ve run it a fair few times). I’m fairly sure that we’ll run them both again, but they might need a bit of tweaking; in particular I’d like to think up a cool way of working with 3d coordinates for the minecraft one, and I also think it might be good to introduce more “not-sitting-at-a-computer” bits.