Jekyll2024-01-16T18:39:30+00:00https://www.prewired.org/feed.xmlPrewiredAn Edinburgh programming club for under 19s{"name"=>nil, "avatar"=>nil, "bio"=>nil, "location"=>nil, "email"=>nil, "uri"=>nil, "bitbucket"=>nil, "codepen"=>nil, "dribbble"=>nil, "flickr"=>nil, "facebook"=>nil, "foursquare"=>nil, "github"=>nil, "google_plus"=>nil, "keybase"=>nil, "instagram"=>nil, "lastfm"=>nil, "linkedin"=>nil, "pinterest"=>nil, "soundcloud"=>nil, "stackoverflow"=>nil, "steam"=>nil, "tumblr"=>nil, "twitter"=>nil, "vine"=>nil, "weibo"=>nil, "xing"=>nil, "youtube"=>nil}Launching Prewired Online2020-04-02T00:00:00+00:002020-04-02T00:00:00+00:00https://www.prewired.org/prewired-online-1<p>All of us on the Prewired team were really sad about having to close down our regular Wednesday evening sessions in the face of the Covid-19 emergency. But we started thinking about making the most of the internet and … tadah! we decided to launch <strong>Prewired Online</strong>!
A few of us — trustees and volunteers — have spent the last couple of weeks experimenting with different videoconference systems and we ended up choosing <a href="https://help.blackboard.com/Collaborate/Ultra">Blackboard Collaborate</a> as the best option, at least for the time being.</p>
<p>Our first go at running the online session (1st April 2020) was a lot of fun. We started small and tried not to be too ambitious. Freda began the session by giving a quick tutorial on how to use Collaborate and everyone had a go at chatting, raising their hands and unmuting their microphones. Some chaos, but also some good laughs.</p>
<p>After all the participants had a chance to say what they’d been up to recently, we created a new virtual ‘breakout room’
where James (<a href="https://twitter.com/jamesmraymond/">@jamesmraymond</a>) ran an introductory workshop on machine learning systems that work a bit like brains. These <em>neural nets</em> use a network of nodes with inputs and outputs; they have turned out to be very good at deciding how to classify various kinds of inputs once they have been trained with appropriate data. James then gave an impressive live demo with the <a href="https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com">Teachable Machine website</a> on how to teach a neural net system to distinguish between pictures of apples and bananas. And between pictures of bananas and pictures of himself! We also had a quick look at another web site that uses machine learning to recognise images that you can upload yourself: <a href="https://isitacat.com">Cat Detector</a>. James pointed out that these systems are making a kind of guess based on the training data — usually, the more data the better. The machines may be pretty confident that their guess is correct, or else fairly uncertain. Pretty much like human beings! And sometimes they guess wrong, with potentially dire consequences in the case of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50484172">self-driving cars</a>.</p>
<p>To round off the session, Colin presented us with a coding challenge to work on over the coming week.</p>
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<h2>Shared Birthday Challenge</h2>
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Suppose you invite a bunch of your friends over to your house. <i>How many people do you have to invite in order to have a good chance that at least two of them have the same birthday?</i> It's possible to do some maths with probability theory to solve this, but Colin wants us to write code that <i>simulates</i> a way of solving the problem. That is, the code should do something like adding together a certain number of people and then checking their birthdays to see if there is a match. If you repeat this checking process enough times, you should get a reasonably good approximation of how many people you need to invite in order to get, say, a 50% chance of a match. At the next session of Prewired Online (Wednesday 8th April, 5:30 pm), you will have a chance to present your solution — it doesn't matter if you didn't manage to make it to the session on 1 April. You can write your program in any language you like (Colin claims he did one in Scratch :smile: ). You might want to think about what's particularly cool about your solution: is it concise? readable? fast? has a nice interface? Whatever.
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<p>We are looking forward to seeing you at the next session of Prewired Online on 8th April. If you want to be sure of getting updates on how to join the videoconference, be sure to <a href="https://eepurl.com/dv2dPb">sign up to our mailing list</a>.</p>EwanAll of us on the Prewired team were really sad about having to close down our regular Wednesday evening sessions in the face of the Covid-19 emergency. But we started thinking about making the most of the internet and ...Summer Hack 20182018-08-30T00:00:00+00:002018-08-30T00:00:00+00:00https://www.prewired.org/summerhack-2018<p>Last week saw the return of Prewired’s Summer Hack to CodeBase Edinburgh. The idea is simple: a week where young people can get together to learn about a particular problem set, and build a software (or this year, also hardware) solution to help solve those problems.</p>
<p>21 young people signed up to hear some of the problems around the themes of <strong>Security and Privacy</strong>, pitched by Civic Digits, Skyscanner and Barclays Eagle Labs. We wanted to allow the young people to think about the scope of the projects as broadly as possible — not just around what their proposed solution was or what language they were going to program in, but about who the end user was and why that was important. These ideas were reinforced throughout the week by micro workshops on project management, version control and presentation skills.</p>
<p>What was incredible was the level of polish the final projects achieved in just a few short days — from a game that lets you cheat by prompting you to give up personal data (with the soundtrack changing to a minor key the more data you give) to the phenomenally named SKYBorg, a robot concierge to help Doris (92), a teenager who had never travelled alone before or a parent with lots of baggage navigate an airport.</p>
<p>The week went far beyond the outputs — it was heartening to see the teamwork displayed by young people working with complete strangers, and the inclusivity of all skills. Whether people were coding, creating art assets, composing soundtracks, or thinking about personas, all talents contributed equally. Perhaps due to the theme of the week, this was the first year we saw more in depth thought into topics like ethics - e.g how would the digital products manage your data after you finish with them? These lessons are vital for the next generation of techies to think about.</p>
<p>Summer Hack couldn’t happen without the help of some amazing people and organisations, and we’d love to take a moment to thank everyone involved:</p>
<p>All the people that took time to come and volunteer during the week — you know who you are!
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/allanclloyds/">Allan Lloyds</a> from <a href="https://productforge.io">Product Forge</a> was instrumental in keeping the week on track;
<a href="https://www.airts.co.uk">Airts</a>, Float, Civic Digits and Skyscanner provided prizes and support throughout the week; whilst Sean McGivern from Gitlab taught us all about version control.</p>Freda O'ByrneLast week saw the return of Prewired's Summer Hack to CodeBase EdinburghProgramming a micro:bit at the Eagle Lab2018-03-21T00:00:00+00:002018-03-21T00:00:00+00:00https://www.prewired.org/eagle-lab<p>On the 21st March I went to the Eagle Lab to program a micro:bit. It was run by two helpers who work at Barclays called Trish and James. 4 other kids from Prewired were there. We programmed a micro:bit to say what we want, I made mine say <strong>**3* KISSY FACE!!!</strong> We did it in Python (a programming language). We used <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">if</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">while</code> commands and made a game where you have to click the button that the arrow points to on the micro:bit, it’s really hard!</p>
<p>We laser-cut a case with our names on it and then we built the case. We got to keep the micro:bit and the case, the laser cutter was really smelly but fun to watch. I took it into school and everyone was impressed. I dropped it and the case fell apart but you can easily fix it and if you lose or break pieces you can laser-cut more bits.</p>
<p>It was really fun and if I get the opportunity I will definitely do it again and I would recommend it to anyone else who wants to try it.</p>HollyWe programmed a micro:bit to say what we want, I made mine say ***3* KISSY FACE!!!**Young Rewired State Festival of Code, Edinburgh 20152015-08-10T00:00:00+00:002015-08-10T00:00:00+00:00https://www.prewired.org/yrs-2015<p>Annually we send teams to <a href="http://festival.yrs.io">the Young Rewired State Festival of Code</a> in the last week of July. This involves working in teams or individually on a single project, for five days at your local centre, then a trip for the weekend to the final competition, where hundreds participants from all over the UK gather to present their projects, meet other like-minded young people, have fun and win prizes!</p>
<p>The 2015 competition was great fun (27th July – 2nd August 2015), and we’ll be entering agin next year. Read on for blog post accounts from the Prewired participants!</p>
<h2 id="ceryss-blog">Cerys’s Blog</h2>
<p>Hi, my name is Cerys and I regularly go to Prewired on a Wednesday. Last weekend was the Young Rewired State (YRS) coding competition. Prewired had teams entered, each one developing a project that included open source data.<br />
My team consisted of Robert P, Robert C, Lukah and Me. We decided to create a website that helped you plan your day, finding places to eat & go, also generating routes in between. We named it <strong><em>Mr. Penguin’s Day Trip Planner</em></strong>. We used JavaScript, html & CSS. I really enjoyed my time at YRS and would definitely recommend it. I am really looking forward to next year!</p>
<h3 id="friday">Friday</h3>
<p>On Friday morning me and my dad got on the bus to Codebase, when we got there we were 30 minutes early so we went into Peppers (a coffee shop across the road) and my dad got a coffee. Soon after it was time to meet our group!</p>
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<figcaption>Prewired!
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<p>When the bus arrived everyone was buzzing with excitement and we clambered aboard.</p>
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<figcaption>Me on the bus!
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<p>The bus trip was <em>really</em> long, approx 10 hours after leaving Edinburgh we finally arrived at the main venue (the ICC) at 8 o’clock (pm) instead of 6 o’clock (when we were due to arrive). Soon pizza arrived for us and it was yummy!! Whilst we were having pizza the buses taking the under 14 year olds had left so we had to make our own way to the overnight accommodation. Me, my dad, Owen, his mum and a dad and son from Glasgow took two taxis to the place where we were sleeping. We were staying in a massive gym hall belonging to Aston Uni. When we got there we unpacked our sleeping bags in the first hall and took our laptops through to the second hall. In the first hall the lights went out at 10pm and in the second hall the lights never went out and there was wifi. Me and my dad were up half the night trying to understand why our project wasn’t working. Finally we fixed it and we also fixed a couple of other bugs. By this time it was just after 1am. So time for bed.</p>
<h3 id="saturday">Saturday</h3>
<p>In the morning we had to be dressed and out at 7 so the bus could pick us up, but it turned out the buses weren’t actually picking us up till 7:30! That’s a whole half hour I could have stayed in bed!</p>
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<figcaption>Me asleep!
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<p>When we got to the ICC, breakfast was set out. It was an assortment of pastries, some fruit kebabs and blueberry muffins. I had some fruit kebab and a blueberry muffin. The heats were due to start at 9:30 but then delayed to just after 11, YAY! More time to work on our presentation!</p>
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<figcaption>Working on our projects!
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<p>We went into the room where the heats were being held and listened to some of other peoples projects. Some were really interesting! Finally it was our turn. We were called up two project before us, so we were ready waiting on the sidelines. Then our name was called! Me and Robert (P) presented our project! It went well. After the heats had finished it was lunch! Prewired was sponsored so we got free food! For lunch I had a hotdog. Yum!<br />
Outside the ICC there was a Caribbean festival that had music, food and drink. We walked about the stalls and stands and then I spotted a stand with 12 different flavours of slushie! My dad bought me a tall cup and I filled it with 6 of the twelve flavours! They were delicious. When we got back to the ICC the names of the projects that got through to the semi-final were announced. No one from Prewired got through. :( Whilst the semi-finals were on, there were workshops for other people who weren’t in them. I took part in an Arduino workshop and created an animated duck that walked and danced, and then I created an animated heart that beat and I programmed it to make beating noises. We went back to the overnight accommodation and settled down. Once the lights went out lots of people stayed up on their laptops. I stayed up for a bit doing graphics for a robber game I was creating in my spare time. Not long after, I went to sleep.</p>
<h3 id="sunday">Sunday</h3>
<p>When we woke up we had to pack our bags because today was the last day, the day of the finals! The finals were after breakfast and were due to start at about 10am. There were 4 categories, best example of code, code a better country, should exist and best design award.</p>
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<figcaption>The finals!
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<p>There were some really amazing projects! After the finals it was lunch time, for lunch I had a pulled pork roll (so did my dad). Afterwards I had an Oreo ice-cream sandwich, mmmmmmmmm, yummy! After lunch we left early, missing the announcement of the winners. We had only been on the bus for a short while when Freda (a mentor) stood up and shouted <em>“Railcode! Its the twins!!”</em>, no one had any idea what she was talking about, as she was watching a live coverage of the winners announcement. It turned out two people (twins) that were with Prewired but were not taking the coach back, had won a prize for their project, Railcode. They had won a drone each! <strong>Well done!</strong></p>
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<figcaption>The twins!
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<p>We got back to Edinburgh at about 10pm. Then we said goodbye to our friends and took a taxi home.</p>
<p>Now that YRS is finished, and my blog is written, I just need to figure out how to get it all working with GitHub and Markdown!</p>CerysHi, my name is Cerys and I regularly go to Prewired on a Wednesday. Last weekend was the Young Rewired State (YRS) coding competition. Prewired had teams entered, each one developing a project that included open source data. My team consisted of Robert P, Robert C, Lukah and Me.Prewired at Codebase: The Festival of Code 20152015-07-27T00:00:00+00:002015-07-27T00:00:00+00:00https://www.prewired.org/foc-2015<p>There has been great excitement at Prewired over the last few weeks as we have prepared to take part in The Festival of Code 2015, the world’s largest hackathon for young people. The festival – organised by Young Rewired State – will this week see over 1200 young people at centres in the UK and abroad team up to create a website, app, game, algorithm or hardware hack using open data.</p>
<p>This morning saw 23 young coders aged between 9 and 18 arrive at Codebase to hear presentations by Professor Ewan Klein (Open Data), Professor Graham Stone (Ecology of Bees), Sally Kerr (City of Edinburgh Council Open Data), Charlotte Gorman (ALISS Project) and Mike McQuaid (GitHub). The presented challenges were about tourism, bee highways, litter control, health and well being, social prescribing and biodiversity. The young people were then encouraged to work in teams to create unique ideas for their projects. These ideas were discussed, shared and eventually 9 teams coalesced around the projects that excited them.</p>
<p>All day, volunteer mentors worked alongside the young people, encouraging and reassuring them that they will be able to learn new skills and extend the current skills that their projects demand. At the end of the afternoons the teams, newly named, presented their concepts to the rest of the room and talked about the programmes, resources and open data that they thought they might need to use to realise them.</p>
<p>Between Tuesday and Thursday participants will work on their hacks and get them ready for upload. Then, joining students from Aberdeen and Glasgow, they will travel down to Birmingham by coach (road trip!) to meet with all the other young people taking part in the Festival of Code. Late into the night on Friday they will polish their projects and prepare for the presentation heats on Saturday and, fingers crossed, the finals on Sunday. Whatever happens, this week is going to be full of creativity, learning, teamwork, and joy.</p>Freda O'ByrneThere has been great excitement at Prewired over the last few weeks as we have prepared to take part in The Festival of Code 2015, the world’s largest hackathon for young people.