We are now in our 5th and final week of the Shannon CoderDojo reboot.

And I continue to be very impressed with the enthusiasm and progress made by all 5 ninjas.

Currently, three are working on their Better than FIFA soccer game and two are working on their colour puzzle solving game called the Mixing Game.

Today we need to decide where to go next. As I see it there are three broad options:

1) Continue as we are with 5 ninjas working on their projects until these are completed.

2) Expand the club by taking on 5 new ninjas but I will be relying on the existing ninjas to help the newbies

3) Keep the same club size and introduce a new skill. Such as web page design (based on the excellent book the library has been given called CoderDojo: Create with Code)

I'll ask the ninjas what they think at the end of this session.

This was the four session and the time for the ninjas to go solo with their own projects! :)

I was very pleased how they formed into two groups (of two and three) and decided on their projects and roles within these projects. We did this by each ninja stating a couple of their interests and this naturally split the club into two groups: sport and science.

The first Scratch project is a soccer game called Better Than FIFA and each ninja is working on different aspects of the game (sprites/costumes, backdrops, game play, etc.)

The second project is a puzzle solving game where the player gets to the next level after solving a puzzle. the first puzzle is based on colours. Its called the Mixing Game.

This is the third session and where I finish introducing the programming tools available in Scratch.

The idea being that further learning is based around projects the ninjas will create.

So I used the Spaceship Supply program to illustrate the following concepts:
- Blocks (user definable chunks of code)
- Messages (so that the Spaceship knows when it has been touched by the supplies)
..

In the second session today I shared a Scratch Spaceship Supply program and how you can customise your own sprites and backdrops. (by downloading from the web and rescaling)

This is a complicated multi-sprite Scratch game where the player must steer the supplies from the supply ship at the bottom of the screen to to the spaceship which zooms past at the top of the screen.

The code can then by used as a reference for various things the ninjas may want to achieve in their own Scratch programs.

Such as:
1) Controlling a sprite (the supply ship by using the left/right arrows)
2) Changing the sprite costumes (the spaceship smiles when it gets its supplies)
3) Synchronizing sprites (the supplies follow the horizontal position of the supply ship)
4) Moving sprites automatically (the supplies move upwards when the player presses the spacebar)
5) Communication between sprites (the supplies tell the space ship when they have arrived)
6) Keeping sprites on screen (boundary checking for x and y)

I then asked the ninjas to delete the spaceship and supplies sprites and just spoke about how the player controls the supply ship

I also demonstrated the BBC Micro:bit playing Scissors, Stone and Paper.
https://microbit.org/