Hosting a stall for the Opportunities Fair was a wonderful experience for our team. It was great to meet so many people excited to make a difference in our community and wanting to volunteer some of their time with us! We hope you liked meeting our mascot, Rob the robot, they had so much fun too!

This week we had the amazing opportunity to talk about our project with Repair Café to all first year CSEE students. Coding Club is a great way for CSEE students to get involved with VTeam -- it helps them explore their passion for computers, robots and coding that they would otherwise not be able to except in their degree. Not to mention, it is a good environment to connect and make friends with people just as enthusiastic as them, and develops key soft skills that employers

We introduced the concept of "randomness" and the way that a microbit can become a random number generator, where every number within a set range has the same chance of appearing. We then taught how the same concept can be applied to images or text contained within a variable, something that the students learnt in past sessions.

In this lesson, the kids explored how to make custom images on their Micro:bit. We taught them that the Micro:bit consists of a 5x5 grid, where each unit is an LED that we can even control the brightness of! The main task of this session was to use what they have learned about loops in previous sessions in order to make animations, utilizing their new knowledge of brightness levels to shape their designs.

In this session, the children discovered what loops can really do on their micro:bits - they control countdowns and animations, and are a core pillar of coding. The students had fun applying what they had learned in the past few weeks about buttons, variables, and loops in order to make their very own game! They were able to write a program that: Flashes hearts to show that the game is starting Counts how many times Buttons A and B are pressed Stops when 1 player reaches 5 pr

In this session, we taught what a variable is and how it can be used to store information onto our micro:bit. The kids were really excited about being able to code their own score keeper by using their knowledge of variables, buttons and simple arithmetic.

It was great to meet all of you in the squares and to get to talk to you about what we do! We hope we have inspired you to join us and to see you volunteering at our sessions in the next few weeks!

On our second week, we pointed the students toward buttons A and B on the micro:bit. They were excited to learn that we can actually program them to do and show different things. The code this week was a little more complex than last week's, as we introduced 'if' statements and why they are important when formatting their code. The students worked hard to understand how inputs and outputs work and how the micro:bit operates.

The CSEE Society, Coding Club and Repair Café teamed up for a fun night of snacks, drinks, and, not least importantly, insightful conversations on volunteering and making a difference! The micro:bits were very popular and the night was a big success! Many volunteers messed around with the pre-loaded images. Most notably, two people joined forces and spent the hour on making a two-player shooting game, where Sita destroyed Josh (video evidence below). Josh dies

In this first session, the kids learnt what a micro:bit is and what it can do. We taught them how to write their first program using simple code. They had so much fun exploring the built-in images of the micro:bit and creating their own little animations!