Mobile app development introduced
A great session with almost 50 youngsters! As well as continuing the Scratch and Python groups, we launched a new table for mobile app development, with two different platforms: Gideros Mobile which uses Lua for scripting; and MIT's App Inventor 2 which is a block-based tool. By the end of the afternoon, the youngsters had built simple games or other demos and successfully transferred them to run on Android or Apple mobile devices - wicked!
Our Scratch group focused this time on developing Scratch versions of popular classics including Flappy Bird and Bubble Trouble. Other Scratchers worked on creating their own games, with some brilliant and imaginative graphics on show.
It was wonderful to see more kids mentoring other kids, especially in the Scratch group (middle photo).
The Python group experimented in the Python shell and investigated the use of variables, conditional statements and while loops. They moved on to saving programs and running these from keyboard shortcuts. They applied these skills later in the session, to create their own number-guessing game.