As the world is becoming more digital, it’s more important than ever to have a strong knowledge of coding and computer systems. But it doesn’t have to be daunting. Just like learning any language, kids are sponges for new information, so there’s a huge benefit to starting when they’re young. Liam is 8 now, and…
Hi! We’ve had a few weeks of downtime over at Liam’s Coding Journey, but there’s been lots going on behind the scenes. Liam has been learning to use Tynker, and his coding has improved heaps in a very short time. With Tynker, coding for kids has never been easier. Liam absolutely loves the gamified lessons,…
Sometimes, there are sprites in the Scratch library that are pretty close to what you want, but not quite right. At other times, you find a great sprite but it doesn’t have as many costumes as you need. When that happens, you don’t have to create your own from the beginning. Read on to learn…
This week, Liam has built a Lego Wedo crab with his kit. He found this project on YouTube when looking for how to build a bird, and it looked like fun. The crab uses the Lego Wedo smarthub, the motor, and three gears. What is Lego Wedo? Lego Wedo 2.0 is Lego’s entry-level robotics &…
Liam has been inspired recently to start creating his own games. To get started, we thought it would be good to try something fairly simple, and work upwards from there. The games where objects fall from the top of the screen and have to be caught before they fall off the bottom seemed pretty straightforward….
BBC’s MakeCode is the main coding platform for microbit, which is the mini-computer for Tobbie. You can download pre-made programmes for Tobbie, but you’ll also want to create your own programmes from scratch. When opening a new project in MakeCode, the standard code menus are available, but there’s no sign of the menu that contains…
How did you go with part one of the racing car game? If you’ve built your steering wheel and drawn your racing car and traffic, then you’re ready to get stuck in and code a racing car game of your own! Liam has created and tested his code for all of these sprites: The racing…
This post builds on the sprites we created in Part 1 of the Racing Car Game. Learning how to draw sprites in Scratch is immensely useful for everything you’ll go on to create, and once you know how to make one, you’ll be able to apply the same skills to heaps more! There are quite…
Liam has just finished building his first interactive game by pairing Lego Wedo 2.0 with Scratch. It’s a racing car game, complete with a Lego steering wheel controller. The inspiration for this game comes from Mi 2 Tom, who has some fantastic projects up on YouTube. Liam’s version is similar, but all the elements have…
Scratch is heaps of fun. Lego Wedo 2.0 is awesome. What’s even cooler is using them together to create car racing games, Wedo robot dinosaurs, and heaps more! It’s really easy to connect Lego Wedo 2.0 to Scratch, so here we’re doing a quick run-through of how to do it so you can get started…
Scratch is set up really well to integrate with a range of hardware, such as webcams, microphones, and Lego products such as Mindstorms. It also integrates with microbit, which is what Liam has been trying out recently. Microbit contains accelerometers, so can act as a motion sensor. We used this feature to create a game…
As coding platforms go, we love Scratch. One of the best things about it is that you can connect other hardware to it and build your own interactive games and robots. Liam uses microbit in his Tobbie II hexapod robot, and programs it using Microsoft’s MakeCode platform. To expand what he can do with it,…
Liam has been learning how to add timing to his code in Scratch recently. While working on his animation of a volcanic eruption, he discovered that some of his sequences were happening way too fast. Understanding timing in Scratch is super useful, because it controls when each Sprite appears, and the delay between each action…
Last week during online school, Liam’s class were learning about volcanic eruptions and the different parts of a volcano. As well as drawing a volcano and labelling the components, Liam decided to show the process of a volcanic eruption in a step-by-step video he coded using Scratch. We’ve been using Scratch on and off for…