First steps with Kano

Posted on March 23, 2014 by blogmywiki

A new cute-looking Raspberry Pi kit and OS? That’s what Kano claims to offer – a rather spiffy kit containing a Raspberry Pi, wireless keyboard & trackpad, OS on SD card, wifi adaptor, speaker, power supply and a nice case you can customise. It says ‘build a computer’ – in fact you’re just snapping parts together, but then that’s what you do with Lego, and Scratch, and we love Lego and Scratch.

You can download a beta version of the OS, which is aimed at teaching coding to children, so daughter Tillster (8) and I decided to give it a spin over a couple of weekends.

First thing we noticed is that they’ve made a text or command-line interface fun. This is what we were greeted with on first boot:

Loading Kano OS on Raspberry Pi

There are some slightly odd Alice-in-Wonderlandish questions to answer or games to follow – I guess this is to get kids used to typing at the command line. It intrigued me, and the Tillster stuck with it.

Loading Kano OS on Raspberry Pi

It has a novel way of encouraging faster typing – Mavis Beacon never hurled a bomb at me:

Loading Kano OS on Raspberry Pi

Once set up, it boots very quickly indeed – much faster than a full normal Raspbian install, though I’ve not tried Raspbian booting straight into Scratch, which would be a fairer comparison.

This is the desktop that greets you:

Kano OS on Raspberry Pi

Tilly being Tilly, she went straight for Minecraft – which was a confusing mistake. If you click on the big Minecraft icon you get it in split-screen mode with coding exercises:

Minecraft on Kano OS on Raspberry Pi

Regular Pi-edition Minecraft is on there, under ‘extras’ – took me a while to find it though.

We tried the video icon – which should play some YouTube videos chosen by Kano. We couldn’t get this to work – perhaps it requires the MPEG codec licence. Next we tried Pong! (Whatever happened to Pong? It’s alive and kicking, Frank.)

1st steps in coding with Kano blocks on RaspberryPi

This takes you through a series of steps, customising the game and unlocking levels as you go – in effect, coding becomes a game in itself. You start by changing the colour of the screen, lines and ball, then make the ball bigger and faster. You adapt the code with blocks that snap together like Scratch code blocks, although I didn’t find the process as intuitive as Scratch. I tried to go back over it with Tilly, but as I had unlocked the first 7 tasks, the prompts to the next challenges seemed to vanish. I couldn’t easily work out how to reset this.

1st steps in coding with Kano blocks on RaspberryPi

One good thing about the video icon was the wireless setup page – it’s another of their chatty text-based interactions, and is arguably easier than using the Raspbian graphical wireless setup utility. On the downside, it didn’t support the wifi adapter with the antenna you can see on the table in this picture. It worked fine with an Edimax, though. In this photo Tilly is learning how to ping Google at the command line – which is a pretty useful thing to know; I still do this when diagnosing internet connectivity problems on my laptop.

Configuring WiFi on KanoOS on RaspberryPi

Snake calls up a Python Snake game and prompts you to try out different parameters at a command line. Tilly soon got bored with this, and wanted play Minecraft. Mmm.

Regular Scratch is on there too – under the ‘Extras’ icon. It seemed to work well, although I wasn’t able to get sound working on our Samsung TV with a dodgy HDMI implementation – though I didn’t even used to be able to get a picture on this TV on old versions of RaspBMC and Raspbian without some command-line config trickery.

I’m going to keep using Kano for a while – I might even take it into school for Scratch use. I like the fast boot-time, the clear child-friendly icons – although I remain to be convinced by Kano blocks as a way of teaching coding; I need to play with this much more and see where it goes.

UPDATE

Been playing with Kano a bit more tonight, and discovered a couple of things. The sound works just fine from the 3.5mm audio jack; I had a play with the Music icon – this takes you to an implementation of SonicPi – command-line music making. Alas, there’s no sample music code included by default, you have to search elsewhere for sample code & syntax. I think a simple tune would be good to have there when you open it. This also highlighted another snag – the Kano books are in PDF format – and there doesn’t seem to be a PDF reader on the Kano yet, so I had to keep referring back to a laptop to work out what I might need to do. It would be great if you could read the guide on the Kano itself – but then this is only Beta 1.0 that I’m testing.

And I LOVE the fast boot time!

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE

I sent some feedback using the feedback tool on Kano OS, and got a reply within 24 hours telling me how to install a PDF viewer on Kano OS. Impressive.

A pdf reader will be installed by default on the next version. We have had quite a few users asking for it. In the meantime you can install it yourself:

1) Open Extras > LXterminal
2) Type sudo apt-get install epdfview
3) User password: kano

We have included 2 songs as an example in Sonic Pi. Open the project, click load and open the “songs” folder. It should be 2 files there.

We are very glad you are enjoying the experience with your daughter.

So there you go. Thanks Alejandro!

Posted in computers, education, ICT, Linux, Raspberry Pi | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Using Scratch to make teaching resources

Posted on March 8, 2014 by blogmywiki

Sometimes I can spend hours searching TES and other web sites for the right interactive teaching resource. This week I was teaching direction, quarter and half turns to Year 2 and I wanted something I could use on the interactive whiteboard and that the children could use – but nothing seemed quite right. Some lacked targets, some used degrees to describe the turns – so I decided to have a go at making my own.

using Scratch to make teaching resources

I used Scratch to make a very simple, but very effective, resource. We’ve been looking at Mélanie Watt‘s Scaredy Squirrel books in literacy and art this week for World Book week, so I used this as my theme.

I stuck pictures of 4 of the things Scaredy is frightened of on 4 walls of the classroom and we practiced making turns as a class before doing differentiated worksheets answering questions about quarter and half turns, using the same targets in the same arrangement.

The next day I put the Scratch project up on the whiteboard and as a class we checked the answers to the questions. I’d ask “if Scaredy turned a quarter turn, what would he see?” – children would talk to their partners, and then I picked one to come and check their answer by clicking on the buttons.

Very simple, but it worked really well and only took me about 20 minutes to make (I already had the pictures scanned in) – less time than I’d spent scouring the internet for the right tool to teach what I wanted, and this was customised to match our literacy theme.


Click the green flag in the middle of the screen to start – won’t work on iOS devices, alas.

The code is here if you want to see how it’s made: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/18846330/. The advantage of uploading the code to the Scratch web site is that you get a Flash version of the game so you can use it on classroom computers that don’t have the Scratch software installed.

The buttons are sprites which broadcast messages when clicked. Scaredy’s sprite has different blocks of code telling him how far to turn, and in which direction, when different buttons are pressed. I also made Scaredy turn in 45 degree steps so the children could see more clearly which way he was rotating.

I can think of several ways to extend this: the other creatures react when Scaredy looks at them; making a game where the child guides Scaredy back to his nut tree by giving him directions; and, of course, getting the children themselves to remix the game in Scratch.

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You’ve come a long way, baby

Posted on February 21, 2014 by blogmywiki

Debian Squeeze on Raspberry Pi
that was then…

and this is now…
Raspberry Pi is baking...

I’ve been setting up Raspberry Pi computers since they came out, but setting up a new one with my daughter yesterday made me realise how very, very far this little computer has come. Where once getting it to work was a hit-and-miss affair, now NOOBS (New Out Of Box Software) makes getting it working a breeze. Things just seem to work – even our Samsung TV with its dodgy HDMI implementation produced a picture with none of the command line jiggery-pokery once required. An old iMac keyboard with built-in USB hub just worked. The USB wifi adapter I bought just worked – the first time I’ve managed to get the wifi configuration tool to work first time. NOOBS is an extraordinary achievement.

We’re running out of time this half term to build our top-secret project, but my 8-year old daughter and I had fun setting the Pi up from, er, scratch.

First of all we formatted the SD card – Tilly made notes of important settings we’d need in the SD card formatting tool:

important card formatting settings

DSC_3006

Plugging the HDMI cable in:

plugging the HDMI cable in

Putting the antenna on the USB wifi dongle:

putting wifi antenna on

I decided to try this wifi adapter with an external antenna rather than the Edimax dongle I’ve used before because the wifi reception in her room is so poor.

Wires in, Pi ready to go:

pi ready to go

The moment of truth. Powering up:

DSC_3013

NOOBS gives you a huge choice of different operating systems to choose from, including an option to boot straight to Scratch, which is fantastic for educational use. We picked Raspbian for ours:

choice of operating systems

Success! It boots. First successful login, and Tilly discovers the pitfalls of choosing a very, very long password:

it boots!

Type startx and the desktop appears!

startx - and the desktop appears!

We got a LEDBorg for our project: it’s a tiny £5 board that plugs into the Pi’s GPIO pins with a really bright LED that you can get to change colour.

LEDBorg lights!

changing light colours at the command line

The LEDBorg has a simple colour picker on the desktop, but we also made it change colour from the command line, learning something about primary colours and mixing light as we went. What happens if you mix red and green light? We tried it out – you get yellow. What would happen if we turned on red, green AND blue? Genuine amazement when white light appeared. We then looked close-up at the pixels on the TV and found they work the same way.

Trying Scratch
trying out Scratch

Minecraft - the killer app
Minecraft – the killer app

Eldest son wants a £700 computer. My daughter seems pretty content with one costing £30.

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How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lottie?

Posted on February 9, 2014 by blogmywiki

'What is code?' OMG, I didn't see that question coming. LOL.

I really have better things to do (planning lessons, for example), so much has already been written and tweeted about Lottie Dexter and the Year of Code Car Crash of Newsnight – and yet, and yet…

I hardly ever watch Newsnight these days, but for some reason I was still conscious at 2230. This really was ‘car crash TV’, from the moment she said ‘I can’t code’, followed by the look of mild panic on her face (above) when Paxo asked the utterly predictable question (especially for a professional PR person like Lottie) “what is code?” (Actually, it’s the first question on her organisation’s web site, so you’d think she’d possibly have had a snappier, smarter answer to hand.)

Then there was that smile (below), some say coquettish, some may even say flirty, when Paxo referred to himself and Mark Urban as ‘old duffers’. Paxo’s body language at times resembled someone in convulsions of agony, trying not to look at the person he was interviewing. In the middle of the following item on another topic, Paxo’s mind seemed to be elsewhere when his fellow reporter answered a question and Paxo just sat there saying nothing. “I’m sorry, I thought we were having a film at that point.”

Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy, you're not an old duffer. Well, maybe not a duffer.

A few thoughts:

Some of the criticism has valid points, but can be laced with some unfortunate language, eg Donald Clark talks about ‘schoolgirl errors’ and ‘Dottie Lottie’. Tricky ground here. Some unavoidable facts: Lottie is blessed (or cursed) with an interesting name, extreme pulchritude and is at an awkward age.

Lottie Dexter is 24. People may think 9 or 11 or 15 are awkward ages, but not so much has been written about the sheer difficulty of being 24. You’re living in a grown-up world, and yet so much has yet to fall into place, you have so much yet to experience and understand, and yet here you are, suddenly, on national TV facing a grilling from Paxo.

The most interesting critique I’ve seen of Lottie and her Year of Code comes from Adrian Short. He argues that Lottie isn’t the only problem: it goes much deeper. The Year of Code board has no teachers on it, and an amazing lack of any other kind of educator or educational specialists at any level: primary, secondary or university. He has political differences with Ms Dexter (who used to work for IDS’s think tank), but he doesn’t let those get in the way of a well-argued dismantling of the Year of Code’s leadership and purpose. Well worth a read.

I’d never even heard of The Year of Code until the morning of the fateful News Night to follow. I was about to send their leaflet round to ICT folk in my school, but after seeing Newsnight, was glad I didn’t.

At times it seems like the world of computing education is going to kill itself through in-fighting, bandwaggon-jumping, hoopla and distractions like Lottie Dexter (it’s not just Paxo who got himself distracted) – and I really, really should be planning lessons (or making a cool new Raspberry Pi gizmo with my daughter – details to follow!) not writing this. There’s so much guff out there, what’s a poor educator to do?

Well, this may help: Code Club have launched Code Club Pro. It’s CPD for teachers. It seems practical. It looks like it could actually help you deliver the, you know, new curriculum. To schoolchildren.

I’m excited and exasperated all at once. The new computing curriculum was one of the things that made me want to retrain as a teacher in the first place, and I’ve kind of lost sight of that, partly through the sheer workload of training in and learning to teach every other subject, but also because of in-fighting among those who claim to be helping kids code.

What did YOU do in the great school code war, daddy?

Topper Headon of The Clash was on Cerys Matthews’ BBC 6Music show this morning. He only took up drumming because a broken leg stopped him playing football. He said everyone has a talent; he was lucky enough to find his. A listener asked what he would be if he weren’t a drummer. “A failure,” he replied. “Drumming is the only thing I’m any good at.” (He wrote the music for ‘Rock the Casbah’, so that’s not quite true, but you get the point).

I know writing a bit of code won’t turn anyone into the next Zuckerberg, but as I think I said at my original job interview, it might just help a few children find something they excel at and which can have career, and life-changing, consequences. My eldest son is at secondary school, specialising in ICT, where his most recent ICT lesson consisted of having to write about ‘the advantages and disadvantages of online shopping’ – surely even a few lines of code, anything to teach concepts of flow and control, would be an improvement on this?

My happiest moment this term was seeing a child who struggles with some more traditional areas of the curriculum suddenly become an expert when were were looking programming and designing in Scratch. He was helping others. He was motivated. He was learning. He had a big grin on his face. And you can’t ask for more than that.

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Controlling Raspberry Pi from £29 Nook e-reader

Posted on December 31, 2013 by blogmywiki

I installed ConnectBot on my rooted £29 Nook e-reader – and I can log into my Raspberry Pi radio from anywhere in the house using ssh. And change the station in the kitchen. Mwa-ha-ha.

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