This year I decided to get an alternative tree for my classroom and when I saw this one from Hobbycraft, it seemed perfect for some coding projects to be easily attached.
The tree decorations are made up of sparkle batons cotrolled by a Crumble controller. We used sparkle batons but if you don’t have any of those, you could just use a chain of sparkles, similar to how Phil Bagge does in his helpful ‘many sparkles’ help card. The intention was that we would use the batons to decorate the tree using sparkles 0 to 7 (0 being the first of the 8 sparkles) that would flash in various patterns and colours. This included some loops and changing the values in the ‘wait’ block to allow the sparkles to flash in order for a specified period of time.
As well as the sparkle batons, I used the microbit project from Mr Bit to program a microbit to play a Christmas song using the attachment to the headphones as a speaker. This was programmed to work when the A button was pressed. Currently, the LEDs don’t display a Christmas message or animation but that will be the next stage. You can see a video of the microbit in action playing a Christmas song here.
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