Today I had a great day at the CAS South West Regional conference held at Plymouth University. It was a fantastic opportunity to find some new ideas to test out. I particularly enjoyed learning more from Nic Hughes (@duck_star) about the crumbles and testing out the crumble bots. I can’t wait to begin making my own!
I had also been asked to run a workshop about Kodu. I had originally intended to use Kodu with the micro:bits as controllers to show how you can begin to include physical computing into Kodu, however there were problems with the software on the network and so we didn’t get to test out the micro:bits. I have uploaded the resources here so you can have a go yourself if you have a micro:bit of your own and Kodu installed on your own computer.
In my Kodu workshop, I looked at introductory skills:
- world-building using hills, water, trees
- adding apples
- adding an object (main character) that would move when the keyboard arrows were pressed – this can be done with the controls being the micro:bit if you have one to hand
- adding missiles
- adding a health meter
- changing the character settings, e.g. invisibility and camouflage
- adding 1st person camera control
- programming the main character to eat the apples
Here are the resources from the workshop:
You can view my video about why I think Kodu is such a great tool for coding in primary schools.
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