Author: Robin

2018-19 FVGCC Schedule

Posted on by Robin

Fox Valley Girls Coding Club will meet for the 2018-19 school year on Friday evenings from 5:45 p.m.-7:45 p.m. at 25N Coworking on River Street in downtown Geneva.  FVGCC is open to all girls, ages 14-18.  Limited spaces are available so please sign up now! Contact us at fvgcc12@gmail.com.

Technologies

October 2018 – December 2019: We will start with the basics of programming

January – February 2019: AI

March 2019: Project

  • Library Database of Seeds

April 2019: Gadget Month

  •  Awesome Shield has a pretty cool Arduino based hardware shield that can be used with their Ardiuno library in Adruino Studio. This might be a good stepping stone to more advanced bread-boarding with Arduino and Arduino Studio if the girls want to go in that direction! In the past, the girls have also used Makey Makeys to play the games they have built. We could take those to the next level and use some of the more advanced keyboard features. Robin also has a Hololens, Ozobot, Rasberry Pis to play with! Also, we can design models for 3D Printing using TinkerCad.

Meeting Schedule 2018-19

  • October
  • November
    • 2
    • 9
    • 16
    • 30
  • December
    • 7 – remote meeting?
    • 14
  • January
    • 11
    • 25
  • February
  • March
    • 8
    • 15
    • 22
  • April (Gadgets)
    • 5
    • 12
    • 26
  • May 3 – Last Class Cinco de Mayo Party!

 

Summer Fun with React Native

Posted on by Robin

Hey! Is everyone sick of the pool and ready to do a little summer coding!?!?

I was recently just working my way through the main React Native tutorial found here:

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started

…and I thought I would push my little app up to GitHub and share it with you girls to see if you want to work with React Native during the upcoming year or perhaps at an upcoming event… ahem… overnight event… er… in July… in CHICAGO… ?  I think you know what I am talking about!

screenshot-1530234853134Here is my repo – but you don’t have to fork it or even clone it, but you can if you want to. Alternatively, you can just do the tutorial. My repo is loosely based on the tutorial and you can do the same! 🙂  If you get stuck, ping me in Slack!

https://github.com/robintschroeder/hello-fvgcc-react-native

For the IDE, I was using VSCode, which is free and you can use it on a Mac or PC. You can download it here:

https://code.visualstudio.com/ 

It has a built in terminal panel to do your npm commands. Go to View > Integrated Terminal to open it.

HAVE FUN!

 

April 20, 2018 Meeting

Posted on by Robin

Tonight we will meet in the boardroom in 25N.

This is our last working meeting of the 2017-2018 school year!

We will discuss our weather wear project and what the next steps should be, including deploying to azure and providing a web API endpoint to the Swift team.

We can also discuss plans for next year – schedule, meeting room, etc.

We will also continue with gadgets:

 

April 6, 2018 Meeting

Posted on by Robin

April is ‘Gadget Month’!

Tonight we will kick off Gadget Month with a little Arduino programming as well as some fun with the Hololens. Tonight, we will play a little RoboRaid!

For Arduino programming, we can either use the online IDE or the desktop IDE – find them here: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

We have a few Arduinos with added hardware, such as Snapino.

We also have two Awesome Shields. Here is a video of what is possible with the Awesome Shield:

Looking forward to our meeting tonight!

October 20, 2017 Meeting

Posted on by Robin

Welcome Back! Let’s get down to it!

This week we are going to:

  1. Quickly introduce and catch up anyone who is new this week – WELCOME!
  2. Make sure everyone has the following:
    1. GitHub Account
    2. Cloud9 Account with our team
    3. Forked the HTML5, CSS and JS book repo at github
    4. Created a new workspace with the github repo in Cloud9
  3. Let’s add a home page for our site – kind of like this: https://youtu.be/ent9dh0dRJg
    1. Add “index.html” in cloud 9 and type in a bit of html (we will talk about this in a bit)
    2. git add .
    3. git commit -m “added index.html”
    4. git push
  4. Enable GitHub Pages in settings (it is probably turned off by default)
  5. Copy the URL in your GitHub settings for your website, once you push your changes, your site is published there! Whoot!
  6. Now let’s add
    1. A title for our index page <title>This is my really great page</title>
    2. A header <H1>This is my really great header</H1>
    3. An image <img src=”myImage.jpeg” alt”really great image”/>
      1. Make a new folder called “images”
      2. Find a great image online somewhere and save as to your desktop
      3. File -> upload local files in Cloud9
      4. push again to git
        1. git commit -a -m “my note”
        2. git push
    4. What happened? Didn’t work quite right? Let’s TROUBLESHOOT!
      1. Can we see what is going on by using F12 developer tools in Chrome?
      2. Can we see if everything got up to git the way we wanted? Check out our git hub repo online.
      3. Use Ctrl+F5 to do a forced refresh of your browser
    5. BONUS: If we have time, check out https://www.favicon-generator.org/
      1. Make a favicon
      2. Add it to the root of your website
      3. Add two lines to your header
      4. Commit, push and check out your site!
  7. Awesome! Share your site URL on Slack so we can all see it!

 

October 13, 2017 Meeting

Posted on by Robin

Welcome to a new year of Fox Valley Girls Coding Club!

We will meet in the Board Room of 25N at 5:45pm, October 13, 2017.

Meeting Agenda:

Excited to meet our new members and catch up with our returning members! It is going to be a great year! 🙂

bookcover

 

Adventures at Chicago Hacks 2017

Posted on by Robin

Rolling blog… Chicago Hacks 2017

Sunday  May 28, 2017

10:45 am – Train Ride home!

9:30 am – Judging & Demos – want to try the app? It’s called “Snooze, You Lose” and it is an alarm that requires that the user either walk 10 steps or answer a riddle correctly in order to shut the alarm off. It helps people that have a hard time waking up in the morning!

Download the APK for Android!

Search for “Snooze, You Lose 2” in MIT App Inventor

8:20 am – After much discussion and donuts, the decision is made that everyone will stay, Nicole and Nikki will demo the app at 9:30am and we will catch a 10:40 am train home. The last bug is fixed, Nikki takes screen caps, Nicole prepares a final release and completes the online code submission.

7:42 am – Donuts everywhere

5:51 am – We decide to take the 8:40 am train instead of the 12:40 am train. The girls are tired and a new bug has emerged. They want to go home.

5:32 am – What’s my name again? LOL

3:33 am – App is done (more or less). Nicole publishes an .apk and downloads it on a tablet for a quick run. The app icon doesn’t load, but we are done…and tired… 😉

2:24 am  – Formatting alarm dates and time

2:03 am – pedometer and riddles are integrated and final testing is finishing up…Caroline is asleep on the floor. I just heard someone yell “It Works!!” from down the a hallway…

12:30 am – Insomnia Cookies and Henna Tatoos – Riddles are being merged into alarm

Saturday  May 27,  2017

Midnight – pedometer is working, alarm is working – now with custom sound, riddles are working – with help from Jessie – Nikki has an app icon and graphics… but all of the pieces are completely separate from one another

11:30pm – girls run off to record an alarm sound “Good Morning” – they escape to the bathroom to avoid lots of other noisy teenagers!

10 pm stuff is coming together…

8:30 pm coffee & coding

6:30 pm dinner – noodles and company

5:30 pm groups form – Isabella and Rosie on pedometer, Nikki on graphics, Jessie take a cat nap, Caroline on riddles, Nicole on core alarm

4:30 pm gaming class, Nicole builds out the first part of the alarm – comparing the device system time with the date time the user picks

~4 pm Girls use post-its to organize the pieces they needs to build their alarm clock app

2:36 pm

All girls except Nicole and I are at the HTML class… we have the Oculus Rift hooked up to the Alienware Desktop that Caroline checked out now… and Nicole is playing a game with a fox…. courtesy of Major League Hacks! Before she gets too motion sick…. we will see if we can build a unity game and deploy it on the Rift…. 😉

IMG_20170527_142315

11:45am

We were lucky enough to arrive a bit early and have procured a large table with room for everyone!

2017-2018 FVGCC Schedule

Posted on by Robin

Fox Valley Girls Coding Club will meet for the 2017-18 school year on Friday evenings from 5:45 p.m.-7:45 p.m. at 25N Coworking on River Street in downtown Geneva.  This year’s coding projects include web and mobile projects and perhaps some work with IoT.  FVGCC is open to all girls, ages 14-18.  Limited spaces are available so please sign up now!  Contact us at fvgcc12@gmail.com.

Technologies

bookcoverWeb (October – December 2017): We will use Cloud9 online IDE (integrated development environment), GitHub and GitHubPages to build HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript websites. All of the girls will also have a subdomain on which they can deploy websites. This year we will be building web-based games based on the examples in Learn HTML5 by Creating Fun Games by Rodrigo Silveira.

Mobile and/or 3D Gaming (January – March 2018):

Mobile: We are looking at Thunkable for iOS and Android mobile app development. Right now, they only support Android, but they are collecting names of users who would like to be beta testers for their iOS version! As a backup, we can use React Native. If we go with React Native, we may use the book React Native Quickly by Azat Mardan.

3D: We are considering using the Unity Game Engine to get our feet wet and then we can consider future projects, which may involve deploying games to the Microsoft Hololens.

Gadget Month (April 2018): Awesome Shield has a pretty cool Arduino based hardware shield that can be used with their Ardiuno library in Adruino Studio. This might be a good stepping stone to more advanced bread-boarding with Arduino and Arduino Studio if the girls want to go in that direction! In the past, the girls have also used Makey Makeys to play the games they have built. We could take those to the next level and use some of the more advanced keyboard features. Robin also has a Hololens, Ozobot, Rasberry Pis to play with! Also, we can design models for 3D Printing using TinkerCad.

Meeting Schedule

October (Web) – 13, 20, 27

November (Web) – 3, 17 (November 10th Cancelled!)

December (Web) – 1, 8, 15

January (Mobile/3D Gaming) – 12, 26

February (Mobile/3D Gaming) – 2, 9, 23

March (Mobile/3D Gaming) – 9, 16, 23

April (Gadgets) – 6, 13, 20

May 4th – Last Class Cinco de Mayo Party!