One of our regulars, Simon Walters, has developed a really cool system involving getting Scratch to talk/listen to the GPIO pins on the Pi. He’s devoted many hours at the Jam to showing kids how to get it to work. The post features two videos taken at the August Jam:
While at Manchester Raspberry Jam, Robert came along and used Scratch (he knew all about Scratch already) to control Red, Yellow and Green LEDs connected to a Raspberry Pi GPIO port
A round-up of the first two Jams by organised Ben Nuttall:
I’ve now run two Raspberry Pi events in Manchester, affectionately known as the Raspberry Jam. The first in June, which was the first Raspberry Jam in the UK, and which featured on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website where we gained recognition for getting people together to share ideas, demonstrate what we’ve been doing with the Pi, and getting kids interested in building games and writing code as well as inspiring people all over the UK (and the world) to set up their own groups. Continuing the success of the Jam, our second event took place a month later in July, which was equally enjoyable.
The first Jam was attended by the hosts of the Full Circle Podcast, who recorded a few interviews with participants and a round table discussion with organiser Ben Nuttall.
Raspberry Jams are user group meetings, this one being the first of its kind being held in the country, all of the hosts attended the event which was held at the Madlab
Tony interviews various attendee’s from the event including: Dan Hett a Games Developer who’s heavily involved with Manchester Games Jam who wants to promote and get involved with games development on the Pi. Also Dan is hoping to promote the Global Game Jam which is an annual event which takes place at the end of January every year, which hopefully will be held in Salford more information available here. Dan also hopes to be able to put on a presentation/demonstration at the upcoming Manchester Mini Maker Faire details later.
Tony also interviews Amy a 13 year old who has recently received a Raspberry Pi and she is a keen Scratch Programmer.
Tony interviews Ben Nuttall the organiser of Manchester Raspberry Jam and discusses his interest in the Pi and motivation for setting up and running the event. A more in-depth round table interview with Ben and all the Hosts appears later in the show.
Finally Tony interviews Martin Ranyard who presented a talk on 3D Printing at the event, mainly focussed around producing a case for the Pi and his experiences purchasing, building and setting up his first 3D printer.
Here’s a blog post from Dan Hett (@danhett), an attendee of our very first Jam. He spent the day showing Amy (@MiniGirlGeek) how to build a game, involving drawing the characters and using Scratch on the Pi to develop the logic to make the game work.
Yesterday I had the privilege of attending Manchester’s first Raspberry Pi event, called (what else?) the Raspberry Jam, hosted by Madlab. It turned out to be a great day, and I’m glad everyone braved the rain to make it.
