Maker Fun

What would it be like to live on Mars? We took a light hearted look at what life might be like  on Mars in 2025. We added biospheres for living and growing crops and a swimming pool to relax. We captured life on our planet using a Raspberry Pi and a pi cam that we put together as a stop motion studio.    Space Pi at Manchester CoderDojo  By the end of the session we had our own s atellite dish  engineered from a  LittleBits Space Kit.  Ready to broadcast those first reports and give the people left on Earth a unique insight to life on Mars in 2025.     What will the journey from Earth to Mars  be like for those first astronauts? Here is  a short clip from the film 'Roving Mars'  that follows the journey of the Mars Explorer Rover Spirit from launch to landing on Mars. Much of the footage is computer generated  but based on photos and data from other  Mars rovers and probes.  Would you leave Earth to go and live on another

Every time I go to a CoderDojo I have this moment where I look around during the session and glimpse the future.  Today the kids and young people at  Manchester CoderDojo  were building a ghost train in Minecraft, creating space animations with a Raspberry Pi, learning Python, exploring Scratch & creating role playing games in Javascript. Take a 30 second tour and see for yourself. Why is it amazing and awesome? Within the next decade I think some of the most important inventions and technological  advances will come from kids who went to CoderDojo on a regular basis. It might be ground breaking nano-tech or a biotech cure for the incurable, or more likely stuff that I can't even imagine yet. But as I looked around Manchester CoderDojo today I had that feeling that great things start like this.  That is with a bunch of kids from 6 to 17 who think coding and being creative with technology is a fun, cool thing to do with your friends on a Sunday afternoon.  New to C