I am always keen to develop my range of workshops and activities for schools and events and was asked to do 4 x 2.5 hour workshops at school during ‘activities week’.
I decided to do a new workshop this year based around Astro Pi and using the Sense HAT
The presentation can be found here
Equipment:
- 15 Pi-Tiop CEED
- 15 Sense HATs (the Sense HAT emulator can be used instead)
- Basic Minecraft coding resource
- Pixel Art worksheet
- Mini Sense HATs for drawing on
- Example Mario Cube
- 3D printed replica Astro Pi
Session outline
- Welcome to workshop (slide 1 and 2)
- Quick recap about Tim Peake (slide 3)
- Watch launch video (slide 4)
- If this is the first time some people have seen a Raspberry PI show the video on slide 5 and slide 6
- Quick build activity (15 mins) – Minecraft in Space (slides 7 and 8)
- Extension – Minecraft coding with Python 3 (slide 9 if needed)
- Introduce Astro Pi with video on slide 10
- Hello World (slide 11) – don’t give away the excitement about what is about to happen!
- Continue story of Astro Pi with videos on slides 12 and 13
- Sense HAT sensing and human senses (slides 14 and 15)
- Measuring temperature (and pressure etc) (slide 16)
- The end of the story (or is it?) (slide 17)
- Pixel Art – (slide 18,19,20)
- Students can try the sample code of the Mario Cube