Month: October 2020

So you’ve started your coding career, or maybe just progressed it a little. Now you’re looking for where else to go to learn coding.

Well, we have good news! We’ve taken a look at the other days in the Quick Start to Code with Swift PDF and are busy recording the next five days.

Five More Days!

You can check out newly beefed up mini-site for the focus of the new days.

We’ll be adding more details, especially around the unplugged segments, as the next few days go by. In the meantime, you can try your hand at the code for each day, as we have sample code, ideas for extending the material if you or your class is flying ahead, or you can learn more about the ideas behind the lesson.

When we’ve recorded the session we’ll post the video on the corresponding page so you can use it in class, just like our other days.

Going Even Further

But what if you’ve done all the extended ideas for the coding, all the unplugged sessions. You’re danced out and your brain is electrified with possibilities of coding!

Well, we have a Going Further page on the mini-site that will give you places to go, material to explore. From more Swift Playgrounds to other realms of coding, like Augmented Reality, to Xcode and building apps for iPhones and iPads and Macs, on Macs.

You’ve taken the first, very exciting steps in your coding career: where are you going to take it from here?

Join us live today at 9:45am, Irish/UK time for another follow-along coding session!

For context (and last week’s recording), you can visit our mini-site: Day Nine: Play your own game

We follow Apple’s Quick Start to Code with Swift PDF (and skip a few days, for now), which is why Friday is Day Nine.

Unplugged

Steve will teach us the rules of Rock, Paper, Scissors. This is important, because to turn this into a game we can code, we need to understand the rules, or the mechanics, of how the game works.

We’ll play a few spirited games, so make sure you’ve limbered up your fingers!

Coding

What better use of coding than to write your own game?

Well, today we’ll take the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, and turn it into our very own game. With code we’ll be able to customise the game, tweak it to our heart’s content.

So come join us, learn a little bit of coding, and start building your own game!

See you at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

Join us live today at 9:45am, Irish/UK time for another follow-along coding session!

For context (and last week’s recording), you can visit our mini-site: Day Six: Track the gems

We follow Apple’s Quick Start to Code with Swift PDF (and skip a few days, for now), which is why Thursday is Day Six.

Unplugged

Okay, take a seat. Today we’re going to break down (not breakdance) our favourite dances. What is the name of the dance? What’s the duration?

Steve helps us to learn a little about variables when we consider what elements make up our real-world bouncing and bopping around.

Coding

We learn about variables today and have to dive into the Learn to Code 2 playground. This is a big step, and a HUGE new coding concept to learn.

We’ll use variables to keep track of the gems that Hopper collects as we solve the puzzles in today’s session.

See you at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

Join us live today at 9:45am, Irish/UK time for another follow-along coding session!

For context (and last week’s recording), you can visit our mini-site: Day Four: Get loopy

We follow Apple’s Quick Start to Code with Swift PDF (and skip a few days, for now), which is why Wednesday is Day Four.

Unplugged

More dancing! If you’ve joined us for both weeks, your legs must be ready to fall off by now. But we go dancing on a loop today!

You will also likely have the song “Banana, Banana, Meatball” stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

Coding

We learn a critical coding skill today: how to get Swift to run our code again and again and again to solve problems. We’ll do this with a for loop.

Join us today and, with a little bit of forethought, we can solve problems even quicker than before!

See you at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

Join us live today at 9:45am, Irish/UK time for another follow-along coding session!

For context (and last week’s recording), you can visit our mini-site: Day Three: Get groovy

We follow Apple’s Quick Start to Code with Swift PDF (and skip a few days, for now), which is why Tuesday is Day Three.

Unplugged

Steve will get you out of your seat and dancing today, so make sure you’ve stretched well and are wearing appropriate shoes today!

By following a set of moves, we’ll 1) look super cool and 2) be learning a little bit about coding.

Coding

We’ll be working from the Meetbot 2.0 Dances playground today, where we’ll learn a little bit about making our own commands today, called functions.

What moves do you want to group together to make our virtual Meet dance?

See you at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

Join us live today at 9:45am, Irish/UK time for another follow-along coding session!

We’re back again this week for more coding fun. So if you missed our sessions last week or just want to join the live session this week, tune in!

For context (and last week’s recording), you can visit our mini-site: Day One: Meet Byte

Unplugged

Steve will get you to follow some instructions, just like commands, to build your own paper origami dancer in our unplugged segment.

Coding

We’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeves for this week to help you code along with us, so if you felt overwhelmed last week or just want to practice, come back and we’ll work on the building blocks of coding today: commands.

See you at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

NOW we’re talking! Let’s get down to games!

The number one question I get in my coding classes is from wide-eyed students, who come up to me and say, “Hang on… with this stuff, can I write games?”

And the answer is, “Def. Initely.”

And you can, too, at 9:45, Irish/UK time!

Unplugged

We start with a good, old-fashioned game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Steve will play a quick game with you all (so get your hands ready!) and we’ll visit with a school in Sweden, as well.

Be sure to send in which object you pick (rock, paper, or scissors) in the live chat so there’s no cheating! 😉

Coding

After all the excitement of playing games live and figuring out how the game play works, we’re going to move to the Rock, Paper, Scissors playground and actually code our own!

Because there’s been a chunk of code written for us we’ll have a great time taking apart their code, adding to it, changing it, like good, real developers.

In our final version of the game we’ll even add a theme to it, maybe to get it to fit into our classroom reading a bit better.

Context

To get more context and other ideas for extending your coding knowledge from today’s lesson, visit the day’s page at https://www.thecodehub.ie/eu-code-week-2020/day9.html.

We’ve had so, so much fun this first week, and we’re going to do it all again next week!

So whether you want to watch it live with us at 9:45, Irish/UK time or catch it later, we think it’s a great way to get a taster of coding on your iPads in the classroom (or at home).

And if you’re coming tomorrow, we’ll be live at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

Big day for us today, I hope you’ll join us live at 9:45am, Irish/UK time!

You can give your poor, tired legs a break today, as we’ll be thinking about our dances of the last few days more than doing them.

Unplugged

Steve is going to get you thinking about your dance in terms of variables today.

This is a big part of computational thinking: we break down things into smaller pieces to try and understand how we interact with them, where we might store information, what steps we follow.

So put your dancing shoes away for the day!

Learn to Code 2

The huge step we’re going to be taking today isn’t on the dance floor; it’s in Swift Playgrounds. We’ll start with a page or two from the Learn to Code 2 playground where we explore variables.

I love loops for the power they give us: write code and have Swift run it over and over again. Variables are a great tool for storing our information that we want to use in our app. We can collect that information from the person using our app, from a website, from some other piece of code.

I’ll teach you how to use variables today to count the number of gems we get Byte to collect.

You can check out the mini-site to see what we’re going to do, in depth, for Thursday. You’ll even see ideas to take variables further in the “Extend” section.

#EveryoneCanCode

We’ve got a special guest school today who show off their coding skills and computational thinking from just down the road: Loreto Abbey Dalkey!

See you on the broadcast!