A Raspberry Pi workshop with year 3
Some people said I was crazy to do it, others said they were too young and others still said that it would be too hard!
On Tuesday I ran two lots of one and a half hour Raspberry Pi Minecraft workshops with year 3 students at a local school.
The students had just started a healthy eating topic based around the food that Tim Peake would use on the International Space Station. This gave me a good hook to introduce the Pi and more specifically the AstroPi.
The year 3 teachers wanted to me to do something fun with Minecraft and include a element of text based programming.
The lesson resource I used is here (worksheet 7) and simply gave students an opportunity to post a message to the Chat Window and then change the code to change the message.
The lesson followed my general formula for Minecraft workshops and I was really pleased with the effort and determination by the students.
- Welcome and Introduction
- Familiarisation of Minecraft Raspberry Pi edition controls
- 15 minutes to either build a rocket or a Moon base for Tim Peake’s next space journey
- Introduction to code activity
- Students type the code into a blank text file
- Teacher runs code from the terminal
- Whilst students are waiting for help they can return to their original designs, reducing any waiting time
Observations
- Students were very keen to type in text and use their partners to check each line
- Generally students will forget the capital letter M in mc = minecraft.Minecraft.create() but with the attention to details and checking less students made this mistake than I would have expected.
- Many of the students in the class couldn’t find the key combination to type a “ or (
- Students showed resilience and were very excited when their first chat message appeared on the screen.
Would I do year 3 again for my workshop – absolutely!