What a great Coder Dojo week! A big thanks to Paula White, Erica Payne, Kim Wilkens, and Debbie Parmelee for making the K-5 Girls "Get your Geek on!" workshop such a huge success. Check out the local Channel 19 news coverage of the event here.

The workshop gave these girls the opportunity to participate in up to three 1 hour sessions to learn Scratch, Scratch to Kinect, Lego Mindstorm Robotics and Alice from our very own pool of talented female tech gurus ;)

I led the Alice sessions, teaching event handling and creating custom methods and loops to make a cow that walked point to point with the camera following, no matter where the cow wandered off to! In no time, everyone took this basic instruction and ran with it to create their own stories. I've uploaded the sample code I used to my animation wiki. Login credentials:

username: acdojo
password: acdojo

navigate to "Pages and Files"

File name = ALICEsampleCow.a2w

I also had a fantastic week getting to know the Hollymead Elementary Coder Dojo club! Anna MacDonald has organized a very energetic lab and they're off and running with some exciting Scratch projects. In preparation to visit them, I developed some flip animation projects, both of which I've also archived on the wiki:

SCRATCHsampleRunningDog
SCRATCHsampleGoat

They both use loop code that sequences through a series of "stages" (meaning, you create multiple stages each containing the main image, each stage edited showing the image in a different position) and character "costumes" (meaning, you have 1 character and 2+ versions of that character edited so that its image is either in a different size or position), both strategies allowing the script loop to "flip" through these images to create apparent motion. Very nice projects that take minimal programming for pretty cool visual effects. And, I have to thank my Friday Hollymead class for inspiring me to create the Goat animation. It seems to be the rage these days! And won a guy a million $ for using in his SuperBowl Dorritos commercial...