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EU Code Week: Let’s Go, Teachers!

Here we go, EU Code Week begins early!

We’ll be live today at 4pm, Irish/UK time, talking about how to host these coding sessions in your own classroom.

You can still register, though it’s not necessary: https://ti.to/the-code-hub/quick-start-to-code-follow-along-how-to-use-these-sessions.

A Smooth Sailing

The goal of today’s session is to answer any questions you might have about the coding sessions. We’ll cover how to teach them in class, what gotchas to look out for, and when we’ll be live.

Of course, we have the mini-site, which we’ll show off, but it’s always helpful to have a guide along with you.

No matter the level of coding experience you or your students have, we’ll explain what material we have to offer, and how to tailor it to your experience level. We have ways to challenge advanced students, and ‘unplugged’ sessions to bring computing concepts home in a tactile way.

The Place and Time for Questions

We’ll have time during our live follow-along coding sessions, but tomorrow is just for the teachers. Do you have questions about running this in class? What do you need? How long should you budget? Will you be able to follow along?

We’ll address all of those questions tomorrow (but the short answers are: iPads, 45 minutes or so, yes, definitely), and any others you might have.

So grab a cup of tea or coffee after school, hit up https://youtu.be/CxKrMvkpJbs, and we’ll give you the inside scoop on how you can get your class coding for EU Code Week.

EU Code Week: Get Your iPad Set Up

By now, you know EU Code Week is coming, you can feel it like a train coming down the tracks.

In order to help you get set up in advance, I’ve made a short video (6 minutes) to help you make sure you have all you need on your iPad to follow-along with us as we code each day of the week.

The video is called “How to prepare for Quick Start to Code for EU Code Week” and you can watch it at that URL above or inline, below:

For Teachers

Now, if you’re a teacher, running this in class during EU Code Week (or at a later date), you’ll want to do the above for you and your students, for sure. But there might be other things you need to set up. Or to understand about the session to be ready for anything.

If so, feel free to come along to our session on October 6th at 4pm, Irish/UK time! Just register here, and join us on the live stream at 4pm on Tuesday at https://youtu.be/CxKrMvkpJbs.

Registration and attendance are free and we’ll focus on what you need to run these sessions in class.

You’ll have the chance to ask questions via the live chat in YouTube.

Different Learning Styles

Maybe video isn’t your thing. If so, you can also read instructions for setting up your class or your home for the sessions.

The big kick-off is Monday, October 12th at 9:45am. We’ll see you then!

EU Code Week: Logistics

EU Code Week is right around the corner (10-25th of October), so here’s a bit of info about the free sessions I’ll be running with Steve Bunce.

What is it?

We’ll be presenting follow-along coding sessions that follow the A Quick Start to Code PDF from Apple.

A Quick Start to Code – https://education-static.apple.com/teaching-code/quick-start-to-code.pdf

The material is aimed at teachers, students, parents, and children. Steve and I will give plenty of tips and tricks for simplifying the material; for extending it, for experienced coders; unplugged ways to approach the same concepts; and answer questions might you have had.

When is it?

We’ll be streaming every week day during EU Code Week from 9:45 to 10:30am, Irish and UK time.

You can find the stream at https://youtu.be/CxKrMvkpJbs (first up is an info session for teachers wanting to run the sessions in class with us on the 6th of October, feel free to sign up here).

The first five sessions will run from the 12th to the 16th of October and then we’ll repeat the sessions from the 19th to the 23rd of October, for you to catch up if you were on school break or if you didn’t get to attend a session.

What do I need?

I can’t wait to get coding with all of you. You just need a few things:

An iPad (running iOS 13.1 or later)
Swift Playgrounds
An internet connection

Join Us!

We have a whole mini-site at https://www.thecodehub.ie/eu-code-week-2020/ with a ton more info, including details on specific days, how to use the class in your classroom or at home, and where to go once you’ve exhausted all of these coding resources.

See you online!

EU Code Week: “How To” Session

As I’ve mentioned, we’ve got a big EU Code Week special coming up really soon.

And I’ve also mentioned that it’s not just for schools.

So if you happen to fall into one of these two categories: You’re in a School or You’re Not in a School; then have I got something for you!

“How-To” Session

On Tuesday, October 6th we’ll (myself and Dr. Steve Bunce, my co-host for the EU Code Week special) be hosting a special “How-To” session.

We’ll run through what the sessions are all about, how they’ll be structured, and then how best you can follow-along with the session from the comfort of your own home or the classroom.

#EveryoneCanCode

This session is for everyone, not just teachers. Not just parents. If you have an iPad and you want to give this coding lark a try, we’d love to have you!

Tuesday, October 6th at 4pm, Irish/UK time

It’ll be a chance to find out what we’ll be doing, ask some questions, and even offer input, if you like.

So sign up for the how-to session and get ready for EU Code Week!

EU Code Week: Not Just for Schools

Our sessions for EU Code Week aren’t just for classrooms! Just in case you were looking at all the materials, like the Using this Site in Class page, and thinking it was aimed at schools only, I added a new page: Using this Site at Home.

It’s a bit like our Coding at Home series: the video session will be designed for you to follow along, no matter the setting. If you can view the video on a big screen while you code along on a separate iPad that would be amazing, but if you only have one device at home, you just make due with what you have.
All this stuff, the site, the videos, the links, they’re all designed just to give you a bit of support to explore coding on your iPad.

Code Week, European or Otherwise

Wherever you are, you’re more than welcome to catch our sessions. Heck, we’ve got an American living in Ireland co-presenting with someone from the UK.

So if you want to follow along and try to embrace coding during EU Code Week, feel free to register your event, even if it’s your own household! We’ve got some instructions for doing so here.

So grab your iPad, sit back, relax, and get ready for some coding!

EU Code Week: The Most Wonderful Time of Year!

EU Code Week 2020 is from the 10th to the 25th of October this year.

This isn’t some odd quirk that leaves actually weeks in Europe a whole 8 days longer than elsewhere in the world; it’s to let those folks who get a week off in October experience a full week of coding activities.

This year, I’ll be partnering with Dr. Steve Bunce to bring you some live coding session in your classroom!

Quick Start to Code

Each week day during EU Code Week we’ll be on from 9:45 to 10:30am. We’ll say hi, show you some cool unplugged activities you can do in class, then we’ll spend a few minutes writing some code so you can follow along as we go through five days from the Quick Start to Code PDF from Apple.

At the end we’ll take some questions that might have come in during the session or that have been sent to us beforehand and try our best to answer them.

Get Ready!

If you want to participate, or even get a jump on the sessions, feel free to visit our little mini-site for the event: Quick Start to Coding with Swift Follow-Along Sessions

We’re so excited to code with you this EU Code Week. While I’m bummed not to be in the classroom with everyone this year, I think we can still have a ton of fun online. So grab your iPad and Swift Playgrounds!

If you’re a teacher, head over to the site. If you’re a student, tell your teacher about EU Code Week and the fun we’re about to have! And if you’re a parent, you’re more than welcome to follow along, too!

Video Lessons for Coding with Swift

📹

In case you’re missing our live sessions every week day terribly, keep in mind you can still visit any one of the videos we did over the last few months at Coding at Home.

This page has links off to the various YouTube playlists, where we’ve collected our library of content for:

Everyone Can Code Puzzles — relive the excitement of the Everyone Can Code Puzzles book from Apple and refresh your memory on all sorts of coding techniques and tricks
Lights, Camera, Code — a jaunt through using your iPad’s camera
Build your own Aquarium App — building on the Lights, Camera, Code stuff, we strike out on our own to build our own app using some of the same techniques we learned with our camera exercises
Augmented Reality — one of our huge hits, try your hand at augmenting your own reality with lunar landers, pinball games, you name it! Not a lot of coding knowledge required, but you’ll have a ton of fun!
And so many more…

You’ll re-live all the excitement of our live sessions with all the bloopers and feed issues as we (I hope) got better and better over time.

So while we’re building the next iteration of lessons/sessions, catch up on the old!

Coding at Home: July 15th, Cipher

Join us today when we approach one of my all-time favorite playgrounds, Cipher, at 1pm, Irish time!

Recap: Sensor Arcade

We said goodbye to Sensor Arcade yesterday with a bit of cheat codes.

We’ll explore the Sensor Arcade infrastructure in some future lessons. The potential of using your iPad and its myriad of sensors is so exciting, and this is a great playground to test them all out!

Now we can see practical applications for all this code we’ve been learning about.

And we’ll certainly come back to these concepts and tools in the very near future.

Today’s session

For today, though, we’re going to explore one of my absolute favorite playgrounds: Cipher!

It’s a little bit about cryptography and coded messages and a tiny bit about code. But the reason why it’s my favorite playground is because it’s structured around a story.

We’ll experience the story and learn a little about crypto.

I can’t wait to get started on it with you. See you at 1pm!

Coding at Home: July 14th, Sensor Arcade, Gem Hunter

Join us today as we finish out Sensor Arcade at 1pm, Irish time!

Bumper Bash

We covered a lot of ground yesterday. In Bumper Bash, we learned about the collision handler, which lets us know which two sprites just collided with each other. This is a huge addition to our coding toolbox!

Now if we’re writing a game we can let the SpriteKit framework do the work of figuring out when two objects have collided.

Now, my high score wasn’t amazing for this one. Have you managed to beat it?

We’ll look at a few ways to cheat the system today — we’re coders, after all, we can write our own rules!

We’ll also explore the applyForce method on our sprites and see what that does.

Gem Hunter

We also moved on to Gem Hunter yesterday. This playground page combines all the inputs we’ve learned about: touch, light, sound, and collisions. We’re going to write a game that will use a few different ways of manipulating our player to get as many gems as possible.

My high score for this game, our first pass, also wasn’t brilliant, so please tell me you were able to beat me!

We’ll spend a little time rigging up some easy win scenarios today. Then we’ll think about what might make the game even more playable.

What behavior will our player have in reaction to light updates? Will we add some labels to see values from our events in real-time?

Come code with us today at 1pm, Irish time!

Coding at Home: July 13th, Bumper Bash

Join us today at 1pm, Irish time, for some more coding!

NB. We’re back at our usual time of 1pm, Irish time!

Recap: Sound Poppers

I hope you got to spend a bit of extra time with Sound Poppers and controlling those poppers to take out the balloons (and not the bombs!).

Did anyone beat my time?

Today’s session

Today we’ll continue exploring Sensor Arcade.

Remember when we made our own game/app a while ago?

We did some rough math to figure out if two objects collided in our scene. This let us make it look like a real game to our players.

This playground lesson uses a technology called SpriteKit. It sounds like a soda-making toolbox, but it’s Apple’s framework for building 2-dimensional games.

Using this framework, we can detect collisions between sprites, which are elements in our scene.

We’ll handle these collisions and call methods on our sprites to make them respond in suitably realistic ways.

Can you think of other places you might want to use this type of collision detection and physics (like applyImpulse, which we’ve already used)?

Join us today at 1pm and we’ll build some cool stuff!