We Dashed and We Danced

A great Maker Fun session with everyone creating reindeer bots and angel bots. Here are the session highlights.

The Maker Fun doesn't stop here. Make your first bristle bot, a hex-like nano bug. The Evil Mad Scientist, shows you how on this YouTube clip. Make one and send in a photo for the blog.

There is one more Maker Fun session before Christmas. 'Message for Santa' is a special activity for younger makers between 4-6 years olds. They will design a stop here Santa Sign and record a 20 second message for Santa to play when he drops by.

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Butterfly Pi and the Great Escape

We did it! We captured the moment our Painted Ladies emerged from their chrysalides using our Butterfly Pi. There really is a Pi and Pi cam buried in that awesome Lego housing! Why don't you put your Raspberry Pi to use this Summer and capture what nature is doing in your back garden! Don't forget to share it. #makerfun #raspberrypi It was a lovely sunny day when we released the butterflies and we couldn't believe what happened next. Our Painted Ladies crept up onto the girls fingers for a little help with their great escape. They were in no hurry to leave and we were all fascinated by the chance to observe them before they finally flew away. I t was a magical metamorphosis. We raised 5 very hungry caterpillars that ate so much they exploded to eight times there original size. They hung upside down and turned into Chrysalides. Check out our Caterpillar Pi video too. Bef...

Caterpillar Pi

A few weeks ago the kids got a butterfly hatching kit from their favourite aunt. Can you guess what our caterpillars got up to last night? As you can see caterpillar number three became a chrysalis! Now we have three chrysalides and a crazy, hungry caterpillar still throwing shapes into the night. How did this happen? The caterpillar hangs in a 'j' shape and sheds their exoskeleton for one last time before hardening into a chrysalis. We hope to capture the birth of our butterflies in a week or so time. How did we do it? We hooked up our pi with pi-camera and attached an eye- glass to shorten the focal length of the pi-camera. We used a cold light to light up the scene into the night. Check out our lego housing. We can change the height of the camera using the gears! We modified an existing time-lapse program. There is lots of great stuff out there: For inspiration and to discover other great projects...

'Dreams is Full of Mystery and Magic ...'Roald Dhal (The BFG)

DIY Dream Catchers for Story Makers Sophie: What do you do for work? BFG: I catch dreams. Whilst other giants use the 'witching hour' to gobble up people the BFG is doing something nice for them by giving them their dreams instead. And this is how Sophie, who wakes up in the middle night, first spots the BFG, he is blowing a dream into the bedroom window of the children across the street. In both the book and the film the BFG is surrounded by dreams he has bottled and that is the inspiration for this make - to make a dream catcher complete with a dream. But before you reach for a jam jar and fairy lights and given that dreams are both mysterious and magical, why not create your own unique light show to represents your bottled and dream. NeoPixels are easy to program with a micro:bit. Here I have created a NeoPixel string from 4 x Flora RGB NeoPixels and programmed in Python using the code editor here . You could also use a ...

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