A CodeCluber grabs top STEM Fair Award!
And I couldn't be more proud!
Lindfield East Public School (LEPS) held their first ever STEM Fair on August 20, 2015, and Keanna (my daughter) grabbed first prize for Year 5/6. Well done!!! Go CodeClubAu! Go Scratch! Go Raspberry Pi! Thanks for your help on the day Bruce Carney !!!
Images speak better than words, but if you want to hear the gadget's code, just KLIK on the KIKI KLOK to visit the Scratch hosted version of the project, sans the original hardware.
This little project was developed to run independently on a Raspberry Pi - as you can see in the pictures below. The Pi does not have a battery, so it cannot keep the time across reboots. Due to this, the first technical challenge Keanna faced was to build a clock that was independent of the system time, something she called a "second based" clock - the code asks for the actual time to set the clock and uses a one second wait instruction to update the current time across seconds, tens of seconds, minutes, tens of minutes and so on. The next challenge in the mix was that the Raspberry Pi runs an older version of Scratch (1.4) - so the option of coding online and bringing the code onto the Pi was not there. To circumvent this, Keanna wrote the code directly on the offline editor on the Pi, which in turn has no microphone, which meant the time readouts had to be recorded separately and brought in. To achieve this, the code was initially written on a Mac with the old version of Scratch and then moved to the Pi for completion. The final code was later uploaded to the Scratch website, which now runs on Scratch version 2.
Here is an emotion that most non-IT-devotees will fail to grasp - writing code is an intellectual activity of exquisite enjoyment: the programmer's mind ticks alongside the code after a short while and as he or she writes code like a pianist plays his notes on the keys of a piano, time flies by, inexplicably. The last Saturday afternoon before projects were due in to school for exhibition, Keanna was happily typing away. Eventually, dinner time arrived and I remember calling her to come down to eat, to which she replied, loudly, from upstairs: "I can't - I'm having too much fun!"
And so, now that over the last decade we have laid the foundation for the ubiquity of software and more minds like this one come online to create things like the Kiki Klok on a Saturday afternoon, we know that the world as we know it is reshaping itself quickly and at the hands of a generation that has not even begun high school yet. Alas, the best is yet to come.
Lindfield East Public School (LEPS) held their first ever STEM Fair on August 20, 2015, and Keanna (my daughter) grabbed first prize for Year 5/6. Well done!!! Go CodeClubAu! Go Scratch! Go Raspberry Pi! Thanks for your help on the day Bruce Carney !!!
Images speak better than words, but if you want to hear the gadget's code, just KLIK on the KIKI KLOK to visit the Scratch hosted version of the project, sans the original hardware.
This little project was developed to run independently on a Raspberry Pi - as you can see in the pictures below. The Pi does not have a battery, so it cannot keep the time across reboots. Due to this, the first technical challenge Keanna faced was to build a clock that was independent of the system time, something she called a "second based" clock - the code asks for the actual time to set the clock and uses a one second wait instruction to update the current time across seconds, tens of seconds, minutes, tens of minutes and so on. The next challenge in the mix was that the Raspberry Pi runs an older version of Scratch (1.4) - so the option of coding online and bringing the code onto the Pi was not there. To circumvent this, Keanna wrote the code directly on the offline editor on the Pi, which in turn has no microphone, which meant the time readouts had to be recorded separately and brought in. To achieve this, the code was initially written on a Mac with the old version of Scratch and then moved to the Pi for completion. The final code was later uploaded to the Scratch website, which now runs on Scratch version 2.
Here is an emotion that most non-IT-devotees will fail to grasp - writing code is an intellectual activity of exquisite enjoyment: the programmer's mind ticks alongside the code after a short while and as he or she writes code like a pianist plays his notes on the keys of a piano, time flies by, inexplicably. The last Saturday afternoon before projects were due in to school for exhibition, Keanna was happily typing away. Eventually, dinner time arrived and I remember calling her to come down to eat, to which she replied, loudly, from upstairs: "I can't - I'm having too much fun!"
And so, now that over the last decade we have laid the foundation for the ubiquity of software and more minds like this one come online to create things like the Kiki Klok on a Saturday afternoon, we know that the world as we know it is reshaping itself quickly and at the hands of a generation that has not even begun high school yet. Alas, the best is yet to come.
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| The STEM Exhibit - the project explained |
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| Keanna with her talking "Kiki Klok" - just a few dollars worh of hardware |
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