Before we get started, we're holding a student competition in January 2018! We are putting the call out for a processing app like a fun video game or a immersive digital artwork. This time students can take the prizes home!! Huge thanks again to Pakronics for donating some more great prizes which are as follows:
3rd Prize: Raspberry Pi 3 Kit
2nd Prize: The Mbot Robot
1st Prize: Arduino + Sensors Kit
More info will be released in January so either check back here or join the mailing list if you're interested.
Now onto the 2017 MadMaker Challenge finalist announcements. We had some fantastic entries this year that i'm really excited to finally share with everyone!
3rd Place: Shoot The Hoop
Bishop Druitt College, North Boambee Valley
The project, "Shoot The Hoop", is a basketball minigame designed to provide users with an opportunity to control a computer's inputs with an Arduino Esplora Board.
2nd Place: Shock Baby Temperature RAW XDPro
St Joseph's Regional College, Port Macquarie
Our project is designed to measure the temperature of a baby bath. The Esplora sends the temperature as an integer via the serial port. This temperature value is also used to change the RGB LED. Whilst the built in temperature sensor can be used for this we have used a waterproof thermometer connected to the tinkerkit pins. Our processing sketch reads the serial port and displays the temperature in three ways, text, graphically as a thermometer and changes images of emoji’s based around an ideal baby bath temperature of 37 degrees.
1st Place: P.A.R.C (Processing, Arduino, Remote Communication)
Parramatta High School, Parramatta
P.A.R.C., or Processing, Arduino, Remote Communication allows the Arduino to control any device that is capable of using the OSC standard of communication. In this case it is being used to control a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot.
So Anish has developed a protocol for communications between the Esplora and the EV3 robots! Pretty advanced stuff and potentially very useful to the wider community as many schools have EV3 robots and Esplora Boards, perhaps if we ask Anish nicely we can get P.A.R.C onto GitHub for everyone to enjoy and develop!
Housekeeping
Certificates
Certificates are now available for students who scored over 50%. Students need to log into MadMaker 2017 and head to the progress page where they can request a certificate. Certificates can be viewed in html, printed to PDF and shared to Facebook.
Teacher Survey
In case teachers missed it or forgot, there is a post-challenge survey here that would help us prep for 2018 if you have 5 to 10 minutes spare.
How to follow us
You can sign up to the mailing list to receive information about free Teacher Workshops, the online coursework and competitions. Also follow us on Twitter and Facebook :)