Digital Maker CIC – CPD for the College Development Network

Digital Maker CIC had the privilege of being asked to run a robotics challenge workshop for the CDN (College Development Network Scotland) in Dundee & Angus College’s Gardyne campus on Friday 28th of September for over 20 College Lecturers.

Teams from all over Scotland joined us for a fun day, exploring, building & programming robots in order to compete in various challenges once the teams were ready. We gave each team a CamJam robotics kit with minimal worksheets / instructions and spent around 30 mins building the kits, using raspberry Pi Zeros & piTop Ceeds (to control / interface with the robot rover via  5 meter USB cable). the Edinburgh team took the initiative to make their rover wirelessly controlled, downloading & installing software through their own phone (extra points there!)

Once everyone had built & played with their rovers, controlling it via simple on-screen button & programmable interfaces (Custom Adapted Blockly by Digital Maker CIC), we then added a line detection sensor, giving the participants experience in electronics & GPIO use on the Pi Zero. The challenge was to create a line following algorithm using only 1 sensor & the Blockly interface, to get the team’s rover around a line path in the quickest time. There were a lot of different approaches, using repeat loops, “if statements” and more. One of the most elegant solutions was a simple algorithm by West Lothian College.

All teams produced line following algorithms with varying degrees of success, but, all teams were resilient & spent time honing their algorithms, trying various tweaks & fixes based on their observations, critical thinking & experimentation, which was great to see. The fastest line follower was under 1 minute, the longest (complete circuit) was just under 3 minutes.

Some teams managed to start exploring adding an ultrasonic distance sensor (HC SR04) to tackle the minimal maze we had brought along too, but, time had got the better of us, and after 6 hours of playing, experimenting, trying and learning, time was up!

We’d like to thank Kenji Lamb for organising the event & asking Digital Maker CIC to facilitate the workshop. We are planning to run a 2nd CDN Robotics CPD challenge with Kenji in 2019… so if you are interested, or want more information, please do get in touch!

Pi Wars Scotland

On the 26th of May, Digital-Maker CIC ran a full day event in the University of Strathclyde for families & robotics enthusiasts.

Having been given the blessing of Pi-Wars (thanks Michael Horne & Tim Richardson!) (and a logo!) We put out the call for teams to join us in a friendly competition, using various courses & obstacles. Our entrants mostly consisted of families with little or no experience of making & running robots. We were also honoured to have Danila Deliya join us from London with his amazing robots.

We set up our pi-top Ceed units & obstacle courses, helped by our fantastic volunteers, Kerry Kidd (@RaspiKidd) and Alec-Angus Macdonald (@alecangus). We were then joined at 10am by our participants. Primary School kids, teenagers, mums & dads full of excitement & trepidation, all saying this was the first time they had done something like this…

Martin gave a short intro to the day, what we (Digital Maker CIC) do & got straight into building CamJam EduKit 3 robotics kits we handed out. The teams worked at their own pace & constructed their 2 wheel robots, working from worksheets. Once built, the teams started to test the driving functions they had programmed in Python 3, moving on to adding sensors (line following & ultrasonic “distance sensors”). The rest of the day was filled with testing, coding, testing, more coding, testing and a little bit of fun competition with the worlds most robust balloons. (for the jousting challenge).

The line following course was a hit with a family that had been struggling with a previous course that was too reflective & our set up was prefect, and after some tweaking, their beautiful bot made full circuits around the course.

The “minimal maze” was also a great hit with some of the families with younger kids, as creating & honing an algorithm using our customised Blockly Interface , making them think about distance, time, directions, with exciting & satisfying results.

We thoroughly enjoyed our first adventure in setting up & running a robotics event in Scotland. The feedback we received from the participants was very encouraging. We were told the event was fun, engaging, welcoming & not intimidating at all, sounds like a lot of “growth mindsets” in the house!

We’ll be running a Pi Wars Scotland again next year, having learned a lot this year, we’ll be more visual & confident with the next one, so, eyes peeled for news & application forms.

Thank to everyone that joined us on Saturday 26th May, we couldn’t have done it without you! and, you really helped us with your positive vibes & relaxed approach to all we offered.

Below are some photos from the day.