JamPacked Weekend

It’s been a long tiome since I’ve been here, you’re all looking well!

Last weekend we joined up with the Jam Packed team (Claire & Alan) to welcome 59 pupils from primary schools across East Lothian for our Hack to the Future Event. During the morning the pupils got to experience 4 different activities from digital storytelling using Twine, Making a plain game in scratch interesting, coding a squirrel using Python and Hacking Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi. All pupils spoke positivly of the event.

The afternoon was a voluntary session on Minecraft hacking which a number of pupils came along to, and all seemed to get right into it.

The Family Hack Jam brought in various groups of people/learners from all over the Lothians, some coming from the city centre to participate. They spent the night creating interactive stories using Twine ranging from the fate of Sherlock Holmes who was having a pint in an Edinburgh pub to a grisly ending for Justin Bieber. Just watching families sit down together to create and collaborate using Computing Science skills together was a great site – Something I hope as a community we can build on in the future!

The Raspberry Jam itself was like a whirlwind, we had Kodu workshops, loads of Pi work with Minecraft and Python. We also were able to have some people building a lego robot and program it by the end of the day. The highlight of the weekend however was the 8 year old girl who led a workshop on Sonic Pi (With a little help from Claire of course). From my point of view it was great to see what’s possible for our young people and at a very early age with a little bit of encouragement.

This video might give you some kind of idea what went on:

I have to say this has already had a positive impact on my teaching, next week I’m planning on a bit of Scratch hacking fun with my S2 pupils.