Peterborough's First Coding Evening!

July 7th 2015.... #CodingEvening

In the year since we graduated #Picademy my fellow graduate @CatLamin has been super busy. Amongst all the amazing stuff she does in our community Cat organises the Twickenham Coding Evening. Cat's initiative was to set up a relaxed, informal environment in which educators and local community members interested in programming and the new Computing curriculum could come together for a pint and some food, support, networking and resource sharing. as you can imagine the evening was a huge hit. Cat has now organised four events since January 2015 and other members of the Coding and Education communities are starting to contact her about setting up their own (follow the link above if you're interested) including me!

Peterborough's first Coding Evening took place on July 7th 2015. I reserved out an area of a local pub and we turned it into Geekdom! Our gathering included local teachers, TA's, potential school volunteers and members of the local community.

We were also extremely lucky to have the lovely @Geeky_Tim who is one of orgaisers of @CambridgeJam and also the wonderful @WhaleyGeek who co-authored Adventures in Minecraft and had spent all day with the BBC releasing the BBCMicrobit. We were also lucky enough that he brought along a flip the egg frying pan game that used the Microbit (except I kept calling it a MicroBOT because I've been studying Big Hero 6 with my English class).

Tim brought along Raspberry Pi's and HDMI-Pi's and we had people involved in Minecraft and trying to program RGB LED's through Scratch. A couple of people went away with a lent out Pi kit on the proviso that they have to come back with it and show us something cool they have managed to do. Discussion was flowing around the new curriculum and what resources people are using and having started at 4.30 those of us that were still going strong at 8pm sat down to get some food. The evening was a great success and as a result I will be running one every two months which seemed to be a regularity that everyone agreed on. So if you're in or around the Peterborough area please contact me @digitaldivageek (Twitter) or digitaldivageek@geektools.com and come along!

"Really well organised amnd resourced - I had wondered whether we might be sitting around in a circle saying "Errrr...", but it wasfar too well planned for that to happen!....Re-inspired to play with the RPi!"

MineCon2015

MineCon 2015

On Saturday 4th July 2015 10,000 people came together from 73 countries around the world for MineCon. The official Minecraft Convention which was held at the ExCel Centre in London broke the Guinness World record for the largest convention ever for a single video game.

The opening ceremony kicked off with a bang and a 10,000 strong audience of VERY excited Minecraft lovers were clearly very excited and impressed. Stampy was there to set out the rules for us and then it was on to demoing some new and upcoming products…

The Hololens

This piece of kit is just unbelievable - you basically put on the headset and you can view the your Minecraft world in 3D on a tabletop or a wall.

The Hololens allows the gamer to view a 3D augmented reality version of their Minecraft world. Players can move the world around, zoom in and out and even put their heads inside the buildings to see the interior or lightning strike the floor and even zoom in to look around inside the mines! The scrolling and zooming features are controlled by voice or by arm motions and the view can be set to “follow player.” Pretty awesome!

Stop-motion animation

Another upcoming release is the stop motion animation kit. This lovely little set includes a little film set and mini characters (you can then buy more of the different creatures, blocks and characters) and you then just need a tablet or iPhone and you can create your own animations! The example we were shown in the opening ceremony was a really nice little film that could easily be created at home or in the classroom - there's a strong possibility I will be replacing my Lego animation unit with a Minecraft animation unit!!!

So on to my own experience....

Obviously I was mega excited to be able to attend MineCon, it's in a different country each year so it was a once in a long time opportunity. However, I had no idea what to expect..maybe 300-400 people geeking out and gaming? Maybe some merchandise stalls? Hopefully an abundance of stickers!?

What I got was 10,000 people from age 5 to 75 and the entire Expo hall of London ExCel Centre literally turned into Minecraft! The centre point was a giant big Ben built from blocks with an immense Ender Dragon encircling it. There were trees and pens with animals in and the aforementioned merchandise stalls. There were also display stands featuring the animation kits, the card game and the Gameband amongst others. Everyone in my group
bought a super cool diamond limited edition Gameband which is a neat bit of wearable tech - the band itself is a digital watch, with date and time plus an animation of your choice (the animations can be hacked so for example mine now has my twitter handle scrolling round it). But that's not the main aim of the Gameband; to unclip it you pull it apart at the diamond block and it's actually a high speed USB stick which has Minecraft on it. You can then plug this into any PC or Mac and open up your saved worlds. The band has Minecraft installed so you don't need to be on a machine that has Minecraft on it either! If you do play a lot at home every time you plug the band in it will update the worlds saved on your band. So what if you lose your band?! Easy! You just ring them up and they will send you a new band at a reduced price, everything you've saved is backed up to a cloud so as long as you know your account login and password you can just plug in the new band and login and it will download everything up to your last update!!! Amazingness!!!!

Fun could also be had in the huge tournament area where players were involved in all different kinds of tournaments, in the indie gaming section where there were some really cool little games (and badges!) (I got thrashed at a Tron style football game) and in MinePark Row where there were lots of free arcade games that you could win velcro character rings on - I was great at this!!

My weekend then ended with two 90 minute teacher training sessions led by the education team - we started of with a basic day one how to led by @ImmersiveMind- I got excited that I had lots of pigs but then died almost instantly at night as I was immediately attacked by about seven zombies!

The second section was on STEM projects using Minecraft - We were given examples and a great intro by @sarahguthals we then looked at Redstone and how it can be used and were given the task of building something with Redstone... I started off with my pig catcher (after having fun blowing holes in the floor and then deciding I should probably build something a bit more sensible) however, my pigs kept jumping out so I had to then modify it adding a roof....

Pig Catcher #1

Pig Catcher #2

Both sessions were incredibly useful and I am now confident I'm going to be hooked... once I finally have a chance to sit down an play it...role on the holidays!!! 

Now all I need is for Microsoft to run an official CPD for a couple of days that ends with us being Minecraft Certified Educators!!