From April 6th through April 19th we will run a Spring Home Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to help parents and kids stay busy while learning something useful during the spring school break. We will be running a two-week virtual CoderDojo making two projects available. During the first week we will make instructional material available, the second week we challenge the kids to come up with a creative solution using what they learned during week one. After the conclusion of the challenge we will award prizes for the three best solutions of each project.
Interested? Read on…
We will be running two Dojos, one in English and one in German, to tie-in with both the International School Spring Break and that of local Swiss schools.
Here’s how it will work:
English Version Dojo – Monday 6 April to Sunday 19 April
We will offer two different projects to work on:
- Write music using the Sonic Pi programming language. At the end of the challenge you can submit your music to us, and we will publish it on our website.
- Create a robotic battle tank in Java using Robocode and test your robot against other robots in the arena. You can submit your robot to us at the end of the challenge and we will publish it on our website, where you can download other robots too.
We recommend the Sonic Pi project for younger children, without programming experience, and the Robocode project for young people who already have some programming experience (or parents who can support the children well), since Robocode is a Java extension and is based on it.
Day 1 will be devoted to installing everything your child needs to complete the training and ultimate challenge.
Days 2 to 4 will be training days. Your child will receive a daily handout that takes them about one hour to complete. These instructions will teach them the basics of Robocode or Sonic Pi, depending on what they choose to work on. Mentors will be available in the late afternoons to answer any questions you or your child might have. See below note regarding mentors
Day 5 to Sunday April 19th will be used for ‘The Ultimate Challenge’. You and your child will receive a challenge to ‘make your own…’ robot in Robocode or song in Sonic Pi. Mentors will be available in the late afternoons to answer any questions.
The English Challenge finishes at midnight on Sunday 19 April.
We will reward the best three entries for each project with a small prize.
Sign-Up
The form below allows to register you and your child and for you to decide which project you’d like to work on. This sign-up allows us to gauge how many mentors we will need, and we will not collect any unnecessary information.
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If you click the Sign-Up button you consent that we use your data according to our Privacy Policy.
Additional Information
Mentors: Please note that in order to comply with child protection laws, CoderDojo mentors will only collaborate on an open channel such as the comments page on our website and Facebook page or via chat or email using parents’ Facebook or email accounts.
Software: All used software is freely available as open source. As with all CoderDojos, participation is free.
Email: for all Challenge information: home.challenge@swisscoderdojo.org