“Most kids coding around the world in a day”, it is one of the major goals for MOONHACK, to host the world’s largest single-day youth programming event, it was the idea from Code Club of Australia, originally started at the year 2016, it saw 10207 young coder around the world participation, it set the world record instantly. In 2017, 28575 young people from more than 60 countries participated in the world, creating the world record for the largest number of single-day youth programming. This year (2018), as many as 35865 young people from more than 60 countries around the world participated together on July 20, 2018, creating a new world record for the largest number of single-day youth programming. So you can tell, it pretty consistently to break the new world record every year, maybe in the coming year of 2019 if it continues to promote this event and spread the idea around different communities.
In a very chance, I knew the MOONHACK event. The reason is that I have been using Raspberry PI for various projects in the last couple of years. I also started the programming course for teenagers with the Raspberry PI with the basic INNOVAKER DIGITAL KIT. Therefore, I accepted A lot of email from Code Club (the organizer behind the scene to promote MOONHACK event), this time, an email from Code Club at distant Australia caught my attention. In this email, the organizer of MOONHACK is very excited to announce that this year’s new MOONHACK event is about to begin, and its idea of how to get kids from all over the world to participate. They hope to join venture with the different local youth clubs, to jointly promote the STEAM education for kids, and its promotion method is very special, that is, design a space-related programming project together on July 20th to celebrate the humanity. Celebrate the special moment for human history — A foot of landing on the moon (At the historic moment of July 20, 1969, the United States Apollo 11 successfully landed on the moon, Armstrong became the first human set foot on the outer planet), by creating a world record, so it can inspire more kids to start to learn programming (by different methods). To make this event more attractive, and separate it from the hardcore Hackathon events which is only for the highly motivated kids, Code Club released four most accessible reference implementation for kids, include Scratch, Python, MicroBit and GameFroot (I still do not know much about GameFroot until today), so it is possible for every kid to participate.
As a long-term enthusiast for youth STEAM education, I always pay attention to any opportunity which can promote our idea, this time, I immediately registered as an event coordinator in the name of our Youth Coding and Innovation Club and made a publicity in our clubs and other local message boards. Surprisingly, our publicity did not receive a warm response, I guess the first week was due to the Soccer World Cup, many parents continued to pay attention to this exciting and fantastic event, but it was not too late in the second week. More response was received in the second week, this makes me start to feel a little bit better, it is the typical summer vacation season, so many families are busy with vacation and leisure, the kids are really participating in lots of summer activities. This event did not come with a high threshold, so it should not be a big barrier for any kids who has even minimum programming skill (such as Scratch) can participate. Originally, I expected to organize a local meeting, so I have chance to explain to group of students how to design and implement the same theme using the different software and hardware, tools, but it was fumbled, not enough local students who can participate on time. Sometimes, a good idea/event doesn’t necessarily have a good response, and this is where we need to learn, it may just need more promotion and takes time for more parents and students to understand its value.
In less than two weeks, I have to complete the organization of the students, finish the basic programming framework, and try to use different hardware and software to implement the space theme, it is very complicated and trivial. Because the related projects are all based on the same space theme, there is not much restraint in the process of implementing different projects.
First of all, I immediately think of the 3D design. Because the 3D design is very intuitive and interesting, there are plenty of the 3D design about Apollo 11 can be found online, but most of them are too complicated. If it is to be printed, the estimated time of printing will be more than 30 hours. So I skipped this option (Apollo 11 space car), and follow the next step, I found the 3D modelling of the astronauts and the famous “ONE SMALL STEP” and “ONE GIANT LEAP” nameplates. It takes about eight hours to print this splendid piece of 3D art designs (appreciate for its original 3D designer, it is fantastic design).
Then, I thought about how to use mBot (a STEM education product from a Shenzhen China corp — MAKEBLOCK) to build a moon landing vehicle, which was simulated with sound and light. The result was a sound and light mobile car, it carried the astronaut on top of it (which is not as cool as the StarWar, for sure). The car drives a little bit faster than I expected, and there is no such feeling of slow motion as we saw in the old black&white documentary, I hope it is just a future-oriented imagination.
As a real maker in my heart, I want to focus more on the hardware, then I borrowed the idea from INNOVAKER’s PEK KIT to build a Star Wars theme background sound and light project, play Star Wars music theme in the background, and constantly change RGB lights, then end by WLED to do a simulation for landing signal. The lighting effect, plus a beautiful picture printed out on paper, is also very fulfilling, it is really what we call the combination of ART and STEM (you get it right, it becomes STEAM).
Of course, other hardware is also very important, including the MicroBit project. There is a sample project provided by MOONHACK organizer (refer to Code Club of Australia). This is my first experience to create a MicroBit project, with the nice instruction from the organizer, it is quite straightforward, but I also realized that there are many limitations to program on MicroBit (of course, for a $17 hardware, you can’t ask for too much). More interesting is the use of ESP32 to simulate the sound and light effects of the moon landing, there is no particularly amazing feeling, but because it can be used as a stand-alone wifi remotely controlled module, it still makes sense, imagine that you can click a start button from web page, then the ESP32 powered module can start to simulate the moon landing, how wonderful it can be.
After completing five hardware-related projects, in turn, I checked the software projects and found that there is a lot of possibilities to expand the project beyond the standard templates like Python and Scratch.
The first thing I thought of was the mobile app. In our club, we taught mobile app development course using AppInventor 2. Can we use AppInventor 2 to do a project? I will do it right away. I remember there was a famous game in the past, Moon Landing, just use it as the prototype, transforming it into a Mobile APP, is actually not as difficult as imagined.
Then there are other very popular languages, including C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, etc. For Javascript, there are some relatively standard Moon Landing tutorial. It is not too difficult to understand and implement. On the other hand, the Java example is more complicated, not too suitable for kids programming, we quickly gave it up. The rest is C++, find a very interesting example, tried it and fall in love with it instantly, very creative idea, I also specifically recommend our TA, Tiger Peng, he will rewrite it from C++ to Python.
This are other small projects that we finished at our coding club. Our participate students are highly motivated. Three students have completed the Python project independently, and five students have completed the Scratch project. On the evening of July 20th, we gathered a large number of students to participate in the grand event through the ZOOM meeting online. Everyone demonstrated their own project, and I gave the students a simple explanation of the hardware and software projects we made. I hope every student can understand that, for the same goal, we can achieve it in different ways, and most important is, keep curiosity, and keep practice.
Moonhack is a great event which can really inspire the young kid to start and learn programming, as a world recorder breaking event, I expect it will become one of the more famous event in the future, yes, we are world record holder, it is not as hard as what we used to believe, if you want to become the next world record holder, let’s do it.
(lots of information and pictures are source from Moonhack website, appreciate for their great efforts to organize this great event)
The original post was posted at July 31st, 2018
original post link: https://medium.com/@youthinnolab/most-kids-coding-around-the-world-in-a-day-moonhack-our-experience-d3931912d8fa