Introducing Project Zygote (working title)

Picademy, Pi Towers 15th July 2014

Ashley, Ben, Joshua and Heidi

Vision

To provide a fun and creative environment on the Raspberry Pi to aid children learning programming and more general Computer Science concepts.

Target Audience

● Age group - 11-12 year olds● Environment - Semi-supervised learning

outside the classroom e.g. after school clubs or at home.

● Experience - may have had exposure to visual block-based programming such as Scratch. Not assuming any prior experience.

The Zygote Approach :-)

● Open world game - programming skills (game metaphor) applied in new contexts, problem solving & creativity

● Guided challenges - to introduce/refresh programming concepts

● Optimised for the Pi● Broad appeal - not your typical computer

game, e.g. catering for range of abilities and gender neutral theme

Video Demo...

What’s next?

● Large scrolling maps ● Implement the challenges for school pupils

to test and provide feedback● expand the python API from just walking to

interacting with objects and the map

Questions & Comments ?

Jot ideas on

your Post It

Notes!

Proposed discussion points:● Some user-friendly constructs such as repeat

n times for for x in range(0, n) ?● Skeleton code with comments to guide the

students● Ability range of students aged 11 to 12● Errors and error messages: how to present

these to the students?

Stay in touch

We’d really like a couple of you to stay in touch to help us with this or to help get some children to test it out and give feedback

If you’re interested, please come chat to us afterwards

@ProjectZygote

heidi-ann/zygote