YCS held another fun event at Catholic Memorial! Working with a group of 15 skilled and enthusiastic 8th graders, YCS and our volunteers breezed through a learn to code lesson involving Minecraft and Python.
The students learned how to use programming to ‘hack’ the game to do their bidding and practiced syntax and troubleshooting to make their Minecraft character fly bug free!
The Young Coders Society is proud to announce that it received an award from the EUREKA! competition at Lehigh University.
The Joan F. & John M. Thalheimer '55 EUREKA! Ventures Competition is a monthly student entrepreneurship competition to support projects with the potential to make a positive impact through the pursuit of innovative thinking and sustainable business models.
The award helps support YCS as it looks to expand operations in the years ahead!
A group of engineers from local tech startups, the US Navy and engineering graduate programs visited J.F. Kennedy Elementary School for a YCS event.
The volunteers had a blast leading the students through a learn to code activity and answering questions about their lives as engineers. Students learned about how the volunteers first got interested in coding, what they do in their current job and how much fun it is to code!
The Young Coders Society held another fantastic coding session with a group of 5th and 6th graders from around the Boston area. Meeting at a friend's house in Concord, MA, the group dove into the fun with an introduction to what programming is and how it controls the world around us. Student's were given a primer on Python, how it works and the ways in which we, as programmers, can use it to build fun games and applications. We worked as a team to complete simple tasks in Minecraft, all the while getting more and more comfortable writing commands using the programming language. Finally, we had a competition to see who could destroy the largest portion of the Minecraft map using nothing but their new Python coding skills and some imagination.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation asked the Young Coders Society to represent them at Barnes and Noble’s Maker Faire, a celebration of technologists, hobbyists and builders of all ages. We visited the Barnes and Noble in the Prudential Center Mall and hosted a seminar entitled “Makers in the Classroom: Inspiring Students to be Creators of Technology”. At the
On Monday, October 12th The Young Coders Society visited Maimonides School in Brookline, MA for a much anticipated coding event. After taking a break for pizza, a group of eight students gathered together in a classroom for two hours of fun and exploration of programming. Starting with an unboxing of the Raspberry Pi’s, each student took the time to assemble the mini computers and discovered what each component was for. Once the students had built their computers we booted up to the desktop and practiced writing very simple programs in Python (Hello World!). Once we had gotten the hang of it, we moved on to practicing programming by writing scripts that would alter Minecraft. Making blocks appear and teleporting their character around the map, students were able to write their own Python programs that would directly affect the game. At the end of the class each student got to take their Raspberry Pi home for further fun and exploration with coding.
The Young Coders Society worked with a small group of students at a residence in Boston’s Back Bay. With parents on hand, the students took turns introducing themselves and talking about the different places they have seen computers and the different devices that are run by computers. We talked about how computers come in all shapes and sizes and how people who know how to program them are able to use their imagination to create fun things. Each student unboxed and assembled a Raspberry Pi and took turns guessing about what each of the components was used for and how all of the pieces worked together. Once assembled, we navigated to the Raspberry Pi desktop and took a tour of Scratch, Minecraft, Python and Sonic Pi. Finally, the group watched videos highlighting some of the creative projects that other people have done and did some brainstorming on projects that they would like to try.
The Young Coders Society held its first event at St. Sebastian's School in Needham, MA on July 17th, 2015. Working with a group of 8 students attending St. Sebastian's Science Summer Workshop, we started by each assembling our own Raspberry Pi. We took turns guessing what each of the components do and how they all work together to operate as a computer. Once we had constructed the Pi's, we booted into the home desktop and opened up Minecraft for Pi.
After playing some good old fashioned Minecraft for a few minutes, we started to explore ways to alter the game using programming. Using Python, a simple but powerful programming language, we connected to our Minecraft game and began experimenting. Students learned how to post text to chat, spawn blocks, create massive grids of blocks, and destroy huge sections of the map using TNT - all by writing simple commands in Python.
At the end of the event, each student got to keep their Raspberry Pi and was sent home with the tools and resources they needed to keep exploring the world of programming.
The Young Coders Society is excited to be returning to Catholic Memorial for another fun coding event!
Let us know if you are an engineer and are interested in joining as a volunteer!