Our second regular monthly Raspberry Jam and our friends at Swallow Hill Community College have given us a super collaboration space that we’re growing into.

Great to see returning faces, and robots, from last month collaborating with new people coming along to explore, share, inspire and ask questions.

We’re an expanding group of tech enthusiasts, creative minds, programmers, software developers, educators, library specialists and families; with or without a Raspberry Pi.

And all with questions to learn through computing, whether it’s to know what a Raspberry Pi is or to gain support and guidance to build a home surveillance, media system or build another solution.

We’ll always be a drop-in space, to use as a hack-zone for projects, as well as offering the chance to work, share and learn together through hands-on workshop activities.

Activities at this month’s Jam?

Michael came along with Pi-Camera activities and resources from Pi-cademy to inspire creative ideas using the hardware with Python programming.

They do say a picture tells a thousand words:

He also showed us a Pi plane tracking project and some of the younger Jammers became mesmerised by the flightpath of the Dusseldorf flight into Leeds/Bradford!

Chris showed us robot projects and plans to explore more add-ons in time, and also an IOT project looking at tracking connected systems in the house, such as heating efficiency and data:

Paddy’s demo of what’s possible with Python Pi3D started us all thinking about what we’d like to explore at future Jams. Maybe a 3D night in the Spring?

Some of our younger gamers shared projects that they’d programmed from areas across the curriculum:

And our very own Geek Gran told us about her progression of Python programming using the Sense Hat during the evening’s Jam:

What’s next, then?

Christmas Jam on Wednesday 2nd December.

(Free) ticket link here to register and we’ll have a festive theme, but I’ll need to work on the alliteration for the invite.

Needless to say, workshop activities will be based around the Sense Hat as we look at Tim Peake’s Principia Mission to the ISS with a couple of Raspberry Pi mini computers later in December.

And we’ll have paper craft activities to share with electric paint and circuit cards with a Yuletide theme. Alongside that there’ll be the usual boxes of projects to explore and library to extend resources and links.

#CodingChristmasCrackers – needs work 🙂

Full photo gallery here