Archive for February, 2014

Starting a Code Club

Thursday, February 20th, 2014

logo This year I started a Code Club at my local primary school.

It’s still early days for me (I’ve only run four sessions of the Club so far) so I’m obviously not an expert on this stuff. But I thought I’d share some of my first impressions as a volunteer.


What is Code Club about?

If you’ve not heard of it before, Code Club is about giving children aged 9 – 11 a chance to try computer programming.

“A nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11”

It isn’t something that they normally cover in primary school (in theory, this should all change from September 2014 with Year of Code, but we’ll see how that works out), so Code Club is an attempt to introduce programming in primary school, rather than wait until it gets introduced in Secondary school.

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Dear Fitbit, I lost my tracker…

Sunday, February 9th, 2014

I lost my Fitbit today. It fell off my trousers when I was out for a long walk while the kids rode their bikes, and I didn’t notice. Boo. 🙁

But I found it. Yay! 🙂

A few thoughts for Fitbit about this:

Belt clips

I don’t like the Fitbit One‘s belt clip as much as the Ultra‘s belt holster. It’s stronger, and less likely to snap (which is what happened to my Ultra and why I ended up having to get the One). But it’s not as effective. It’s hard to attach it to many of my clothes, which was never the case with the Ultra. And it falls off. This isn’t the first time it’s fallen off, although it’s the first time it’s happened without me noticing.

Design-wise, I think it needs reconsidering.

Knowing when I lost it

We’d been out for hours. I had no idea when it had gone missing.

But the Fitbit app on my Nexus 4 background syncs with my Fitbit. I checked my phone.

Last synced: 40 minutes ago.

That was a big clue. I knew where we’d been and could retrace my steps. Knowing how fast we’d been going and that my phone had last seen the Fitbit 40 minutes before gave me a rough idea of where it might be.

But Fitbit, if your app stored a location with each sync, and could show me a map, that would’ve been so much better! I guess you need to think about the battery implications for my phone, but even a rough large-radius location estimate would’ve been appreciated.

Using my phone as a fitbit-detector

When I tried to manually get the app to sync with the Fitbit, it threw a “Tracker not found” error.

I retraced my steps, repeatedly hitting the sync button. My idea was that once I was within Bluetooth range (What is Bluetooth’s range outside? A dozen metres?) my phone would sync, and I’d know I was close.

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