Steve On Java

With the help of some local parents, I ran a Raspberry Pi and NAO Robot workshop for teach programming to 10-14 year old children. By the end of the 4 hour session, all of the kids were able to assemble a Raspberry Pi and touchscreen, program changes to a simple Java-based game, and create behaviors that ran on the NAO humanoid robot. Not bad for a sleepy vacation day. 🙂

We were fortunate enough to the team from Aldebaran Robotics who flew in all the way from France to help out. Also, the kids were great, exceeding my expectations, and even impressing the Aldebaran guys.

Here are some photos from the event:

The updated slide deck for teaching Java on the Raspberry Pi is here:

And the English translated version of the NAO robotics programming workshop is here:

(Credit to Daniel De Luca for content creation and Nicolas Rigaud on translation)

Special thanks to Nina Shulman for all her hard work coordinating the workshop!

I was invited to speak at the Devoxx 4 Kids Netherlands event, so I dropped in right after my Gosling interview. This was literally right after Hawaii. I had only 24 hours at home between events, which was just enough time to put the finishing touches on Lego Duke version 6.1 (the replacement for the one stolen in San Francisco).

The Netherlands Devoxx 4 Kids event was really well organized. The Java Duchess chapter here in the Netherlands ran it, and were so organized that they had a 95% attendance rate. Also, I was worried the kids would not be able to handle three 1.5 hour workshops in a row, but they had a great agenda with snacks and outdoor breaks so the kids would not get tired (I think some adult tech conferences could benefit from this).

All of the groups were able to make some Java code modifications to the game and compile and run it successfully, so they are full fledged Java hackers. They may even be more advanced than their parents, because they were using the new lambda streaming API. 🙂

Here is a slide show with some pictures from the event. As you can see, the rebuilt Lego Duke was a huge success:

For Dutch parents who want the slide decks in their native language, here are the slides that Saskia translated for me. I think it also helped quite a bit with the kids who understood enough English, but needed some help from native speakers from time to time:

Next stop is W-JAX with Toni Epple. More details on this coming soon.

I did a successful workshop this past weekend at Silicon Valley Code Camp with 50 very enthusiastic future developers.  They were ages 10 and up, and everyone in the class got a Java game running on their Pis, and made 2 or more improvements in the span of a few hours.

Here is a picture of some of the young hackers at work:

This lab also happens to be easy to run, so I recommend giving it a try at a local school or at home with your own young ones.

Here is what you need:

So for as little as $45 you can have a mini computer for kids to hack on, and if you get the whole setup you have the ultimate portable lab kit.

To setup the Pi for the first time, you need to install Linux, Java, and download the source code for the game.  This can be accomplished by following the instructions on my earlier blog entry on how to setup your Raspberry Pi for the first time:

• JavaFX on Raspberry Pi – 3 Easy Steps

The source code for the Java lambdas game I used is available in Github here, along with all the build scripts for executing it on the Raspberry Pi:

• Mary Had a Little Lambda GitHub Repo

If you want a shortcut for setting up the above, I uploaded an image that should be compatible with any 8GB or greater SD card for download here (if you choose this option, you can skip the above two steps):

Raspberry Pi 4 Kids Workshop Image

Setting up the hardware and running the lab is as easy going through the presentation deck I prepared.  I uploaded the full deck to slideshare (which includes hardware setup, code walkthrough, and some kid-friendly warm-up slides) here:

Some notes for folks giving this as a lab:

• Make sure you get through the electrical safety slide before distributing hardware to avoid any “oops!” moments.
• When going through the code, ask the kids what ideas they have for making simple modifications.  Some easy ones include:
  • Increase the number of sheep that get generated by the Barn
  • Change the colors of the animals when they step on the Rainbow
  • Change the scale of the Fox when he eats animals
  • The kids will come up with plenty more ideas on their own!
• I also recommend pre-connecting the cable to the HDMI board so that you don’t have any bent pins or the cables don’t end up upside-down

Give this a try with your own budding group of computer hackers and see how much fun they can have!