Computer.lab and the Young Engineers join forces on Open Evening

On Wednesday 2nd July Loreto High School had its second 'Open Evening' this year and Computer.lab went down to work with the Young Engineers in the Technology Department.  The aim was to combine some mechanical engineering activities with computer programming through the medium of robotics.

The pupils used Lego Mindstorms kits to make some tracked robotic vehicles out which were later programmed to move in different ways using the NQC language. This mechanical engineering part of the work involved assembling Lego Technic parts including gears, motors and sensors by following a set of construction diagrams.

You can read more about how these robots were programmed on our Mind.lab blog.

More free Raspberry Pi kit for Computer.lab

To celebrate making their 100,000 PiBow case for the Raspberry Pi, the kind people at Pimoroni have provided lots of Pi-releated goodies in their "Good Causes" giveaway.  Our Computer.lab was lucky enough to be awarded one of the packs which included 10 PiBowcases, a PiHub, 2 PiBrellas, 2 PiGlows, Miss Philbin's 'Aventures with a Raspberry Pi Book' and a kit of electronic parts to make the projects in the book.

We'll be putting all these items to good use as we start up Pi.lab, (the Raspberry Pi part of Computer.lab) again with the new term in September.  Watch this space for the fun we have!

Computer.lab visits St. Wilfred's RC Primary School

Last term Mr. M. Jones, Loreto's Computer.lab coordinator, visited in St. Wilfred's RC Primary School in Hulme to do two computer games programming workshops using the Game Maker software.

Photos and more text to follow ...

Computer.lab News - Loreto Pupils Win Raspberry Pi's

The Raspberry Pi is a low cost computer which has been developed to help pupils learn computer programming as part of the new National Curriculum in ICT and Computer Science.

Last term many of our pupils took part in Google’s ‘Hour of Code’ project where they did some introductory programming courses in and they have been rewarded by the gift of five free Raspberry Pi kits to be used in school.

We now have a computer club running in in school called Computer.lab where pupils can learn about how computers work as well as how to program them to perform tasks. The five new Raspberry Pi kits will be a welcome addition to the club’s growing hardware resources and soon the pupils will be using them to create programmable robot buggies which can move around the classroom avoiding obstacles and following lines.

In September 2014 Loreto pupils will be able to take a GCSE in Computer Science in which programming is a key element and the Raspberry Pi kits will be very useful for this course. Hopefully some of them will go on to do Computer Science at University and become the next generation of computer programmers, which is vital for our country’s economy and technological development.

Loreto Computer.lab

Welcome to our new Computer.lab blog.  This is a club run by the ICT Department at Loreto High School, Chorlton.  The pupils will be involved in many different computer-related learning activities including:

• How to program a computer in a programming language
• Using computers to control devices such as lights and motors
• The main elements of computer hardware
• Operating systems and why they are needed
• Creating computer games with graphics and sound
• Writing their own blogs to record their experiences
• Creating other types of digital content

Computer.lab sessions will run from 3:30pm until 4:30pm in the learning space outside ICT Room 113. They will start on Monday 4 November 2013 and there will be two sessions each week until the end of term:

• Mondays - Computer hardware, programming and control
• Wednesdays - Creating computer games

In the Monday sessions pupils will be using Raspberry Pi computers to learn about the main parts of a computer system, the Linux operating system, how to write programs in Python and how to control other devices with a computer.

In the Wednesday sessions pupil will be using Game Maker software to create simple computer games in the style of such as classics as PacMan, Space Invaders and Super Mario.  These programs will feature graphics and sound created by the pupils themselves.

Watch this space for details of how we get on at Computer.lab !