Here is a request for donations from the organisers of CoderDojo Leicester who are looking to diversify the skills they offer to teach kids how to code…
Dear Everybody,
Our club has now been running for over a year and has grown gradually throughout. We now have an average of 15 weekly attendees with varying levels of skills. We hope that this club will continue to grow and with that we hope to diversify the level of skills.
Below are some of the skills that we have learned so far:
- Scratch
- Various complex programming concepts in the form of fun animations and games.
- Learning concept to control Lego Mindstorm
- HTML
- designed and programmed their own website, and helped with our club website (www.coderdojoleicester.com)
- Python
- Worked out the python interface to the BrickPi module by experimentation and understanding the examples.
- Writing functions to turn robot direction commands into motor speed.
- Robotics
- Building and optimising a differential drive robot out of Lego Mindstorms parts.
- Reading data from an ultrasonic range sensor and processing it to detect obstacles.
- Combining these functions to create a robot who can escape from a simple maze.(nearly!)
So far we have been sponsored:
- 5 x Raspberry Pis
- The venue
- Brick Pi (Interface between Raspberry Pi and Lego Mindstorm)
- The Mindstorm has been provided (on loan) by Dave, one of our volunteers.
The aim of the club is to eventually be able to give the kids the opportunity to learn lots of different technical skills, that will not only benefit their future career, but also show them how fun it can be. In order to do this we need to be able to buy some kit.
Guidance Navigation Limited have allowed us to use their facilities at 2 Meridian South since the club started and are now sponsoring us £500, with the opportunity of matching donations up to another £500. Below is a plan of what we would like to do with the monies, depending on how much we raise:
£500
- £169 to front the purchasing of 50 wristbands for kids to keep all their work in one place
- £200 Lego Mindstorm Kit
- £140 Brick Pi and batteries
£1000
- £200 2 x Electronic Kit with 300 different experiments
- £100 5 x Raspberry Pi time lapse cameras
- £240 3 x Arduino starter kit
- £50 Books with Arduino projects and experiments
£1500
- £180 Entry fee for competition
- £220 Competition related expenses
The club is free and will remain free. This is just an email asking for donations, so that we can buy some kit to diversify the skills of all the members of our club and to take advantage of the great opportunity that was made to us by Guidance Navigation. We have until the 31st of November to raise the monies, so if you wish to make a donation, you can either give it to Ed at out next session (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/coderdojo-live-session-17-tickets-14266402193) or if it’s easier you can transfer into the account stated below, with CDL written as the reference.
Sort Code: 40-28-24
Account #: 81556096
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for coming every week and for being so enthusiastic about learning.
Kind regards,
The Leicester CoderDojo team 🙂