Past Workshops

What else have we done at GPN?

Some of the previous projects we've got stuck into at GPN include:

MUDs

The term MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon. There are text-based adventure games where you can move from room to room, pick up items and fight dragons. The characters, story and locations are up to you, and we've been amazed at the MUDs produced.

Pygame

Ever wanted to create a game like the Flash games you see on the internet? One of the oldest is whack-a-mole, where the goal is to hit moles as they pop out of the ground. We made our own versions of this game, including whack-a-mozzie. From this simple base and the Pygame library, you can create all kinds of fun games.

Chatbots

Do you use GTalk, AIM, IRC or Windows Live Messenger? Instant messaging has become widely used for keeping in touch with friends and just hanging out. At GPN we built programs which can chat to you. We started from simple bots which act like small children and ask too many questions, and we looked at more complex bots which learn how to talk from everything you say to it.

Android Apps

Do you have a smartphone? You can buy (or download for free) heaps of apps from the AppStore or Android Market. For one GPN workshop, we created apps that used touch interaction and sound on Android phones.

Pyglet

Like Pygame, Pyglet is another library which makes it easy to create games. It handles drawing to the screen and mouse and keyboard input. Pyglet is built on OpenGL, a graphics library used in a lot of 3D programs like games. This means that we can do 3D graphics in Python!

Lego Mindstorms

Building robots is incredibly fun. It's even more fun when you can build them in Lego, and then program them to act autonomously and make decisions based on their environment. We built robots which used sonar and light sensors to follow objects and avoid collisions.

Google App Engine

App Engine is a service which makes it easy to create dynamic and interactive websites using Python. It provides tools for storing information in databses and creating custom web pages on the fly. We created apps to search for the names of colours, to create memes with images and text and to help design webpages.

And many more

We've also covered how the internet works, how we can communicate over a network securely using cryptography, how to use Google Trends, how barcodes and QR codes work, using HTML and CSS to create pretty web pages. We've even pulled apart computers to see how they work. (But don't worry, we put them back together again afterwards!)