We’re busy preparing for the upcoming term. Coding starts next week!
Classes are on Monday (Diocesan School for Girls), Tuesday (St Cuthbert’s College), Wednesday (Saint Kentigern), and Thursday (Saint Kentigern).
If you’d like to know more, please contact info@codechampions.nz
Code Champions July 2025
Thanks to all our young coders for their hard work and enthusiasm during the Minecraft and Robotics holiday course at St Cuthbert’s College.
On the first day, they successfully completed several coding challenges and tasks we set for them in Minecraft Education. The following day, we had a lot of fun coding robots. They picked up the methods very quickly and produced some great results, which included a ‘disco’ with dance moves and lights, and a speed test, where they had to calculate how fast the robot could go (from coding the movement, to measuring the track and time, to the maths at the end!).
Code Champions July 2025
We challenged students to solve the following puzzle:
A farmer has 10 trees and plants them in 5 rows with 4 trees in each row. How?
The answer is by using a star (Pentagram) shape, as follows:
Code Champions June 2025
Term 2’s work for most classes has been based on Python’s Turtle module, which allows students to draw images by using code.
We have gradually learned from the basic instructions (forward, back, left, and right) through to the more complex pendup/pendown (allowing movement around the canvas), color and pensize, and loops.
There’s more to go but results, so far, are looking great. Well done everyone.
Code Champions May 2025
You may have been wondering why students received a small plastic duck earlier this term.
A story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer describes how a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck.
So, we gave out young coders their very own duck to chat to about any problems they were having with their code!
Code Champions April 2025
The end of term is in sight and there’s just one more coding class to go next week.
We hope our young coders have enjoyed the work they have been doing and look forward to continuing in Term 2.
If you have any question about next term, please contact admin@codechampions.nz
Code Champions April 2025
Welcome to 2025. We’re busy planning and preparing for an awesome year of coding.
Code Champions will continue to host after-school classes at St Cuthbert’s College (Tuesday) and Saint Kenitgern Boys’ and Girls’ School (Wednesday and Thursday). In addition, we’re delighted to be starting a new course at Diocesan School for Girls (Monday).
If you would like information about any of these classes, please contact Greg Adams at admin@codechampions.nz
Code Champions January 2025
We’re already half-way through the term, four classes down, four to go. And it’s been very busy and productive so far.
Creating art with code
Our junior groups have been working with a program called Logo. It has introduced them to a more text-based challenge with an artistic outcome. They have to write instructions for the the program to follow, giving exact directions, colours, angles, etc. These have created some amazing designs, shapes and images, especially once they learned about the ‘repeat’ and ‘random’ options – as you can see below
Webcam filters
The older groups have continued their work with Javascript, first creating a number guessing game. After writing the code, they embedded this on a webpage, adding colours and images, as well as their own tweaks to the game.
Now they are trying their hand at accessing the laptop’s webcam and adding filters to the feed. The code is precise, so they have had to be spot on with their syntax. But it’s worth the effort, as the outcomes are weird and wonderful, from turning themselves into a smurf to inverting the image (similar to an old negative).
Code Champions November 2024
We finished Term 3’s coding classes with a coding challenge to test the effectiveness of an optical illusion.
While they may not look it, the horizontal lines in this image are straight and parallel. To prove it, the classes took the code that produces the image and tweaked the settings to change the offset, size and colour of the squares, all of which help to determine the effectiveness of the illusion.
You can see from the ‘chequerboard’ below that simply separating the squares proves the shape of the lines. Likewise, changing the colour of the squares – in this case to ‘cyan’ – reduces the illusion, due to there being less colour contrast than for the black.
Code Champions September 2024
Our older classes have been tackling JavaScript this term.
It’s a challenging programming language but offers some fun and engaging outcomes, plus the chance to start adding more interactivity to the HTML and CSS code from last term.
The couple of weeks we’ve been working with variables. This gave us the opportunity to create and run a ‘dog age calculator’ and code that calculates how much food we’ll eat in a lifetime.
Next up loops!
Code Champions September 2024
