A Los Angeles Hackerspace
Learn to Code with Us: Holiday Schedule
Posted on November 21st, 2013 by at0mbxmb • Filed under Events • 2 Comments
Quick announcement, everyone! Holidays are coming up, so our regular Wednesday night Learn to Code with Us events will be slightly more sporadic. (If you’ve never been to Learn to Code with Us, you can learn more about it by clicking here.)
We know you love to learn to code with us
Here are the dates when we will not be meeting:
- Nov 27th
- Dec 18th
- Dec 25th
- Jan 1st
This means that if you’d like to come on by and Learn to Code with Us ever again in 2013, Dec 4th and Dec 11th are your last chances! After that, we won’t meet again until Jan 8th.
Sweet sweet memories of 2013
See you soon!
Location/Parking Information For PdWeekend Workshops And Handmade Music
Posted on November 15th, 2013 by theron • Filed under Events • No Comments
The Pd Weekend workshops will be held at STAR Prep Academy, and Handmade Music will be held at STAR Education’s “Convention Center”. Star Prep Academy is at 10101 Jefferson Blvd in Culver City. The STAR Prep Academy building is at Pearson Street (which is more of an alley than a street), and there is some parking along Pearson. Otherwise, you can park in an spot labeled “STAR” in the parking lot one driveway West. They share the parking lot, so please be careful to only park in the STAR spots or you may be towed. There is also plenty of street parking, but keep in mind that the North side of the street is metered pretty much all day long, and it’s about $1 an hour.
For the workshops, enter the Eco Station lobby and go through the door on the right to the Prep Academy. We should have signs up to help guide to to the classrooms. There will also be STAR staff, and CRASH Space/New Blankets volunteers to help as well.
Handmade Music is in STAR Education, which is across Pearson. We will also have folks around to help guide you to the right place.
Tweet Theron @bangsplat with questions on the day.
Here’s a map to help out with the parking, plus a PDF that also includes a street map:
STAR Parking – PD Weekend (PDF Download)
Little Girls are Taking Over STEM
Posted on October 27th, 2013 by at0mbxmb • Filed under Events • 1 Comment
Michelle Leonhart (under the blue robot poster) leads young ladies in writing their first hand-written program
Yesterday, the LA Makerspace teamed up with our bestest friends at Crashspace to put on Coding Workshop for Young Girls (Ages 7 – 13). Many of the young ladies had prior experience with Scratch (a language that allows students to drag and drop visual snippets of code), and were able to apply that experience to their first day of written programming at this workshop.
These two had the answers to almost every question in class
The workshop was led by Michelle Leonhart who is an officer at here at Crashspace, a Director of the LA Makerspace, and a professional Software Engineer at textPlus. The workshop began with a short lecture on the history of women in programming. (Did you know that the vast majority of the original computer programmers were women? Or that the creator of the first algorithm intended for use on a computer was a woman? Or that the idea of machine-independent languages, debugging, and the compiler all come from one amazing woman?)
Working on her first written program ever
After the history lesson, Michelle then walked the students through the design and implementation of a series of simple programs in Processing. Processing is a programming language that stands on top of Java, but is optimized for creating drawings and animations. Because of this, every line of code written results in instant visual feedback, and helps programmers learn from their own code quickly and easily.
Rainbow animated circles demonstrating the power of for loops
The girls began by creating basic shapes, then graduated up to using for loops and if statements to create awesome animations. They also learned about randomized behaviour, RGB color codes, x-y coordinate systems, and how to set up references to files (mostly My Little Pony and Pokemon graphics) in their programs.
Helping each other with their code
If you missed out on this workshop, don’t fret! More will follow, and the materials are available for educational use here.
Pumpkin Carving Oct 26th 7pm
Posted on October 19th, 2013 by outlawpoet • Filed under Events • No Comments
Come to Crashspace and carve pumpkins! Bring your own squash cultivar and make a pretty project with help from our expert staff. In addition to standard faces and carvings, see people experimenting with blinkies and alternative lighting strategies.
Open to the public, October 26th 7pm at the space.
PD Weekend 2013
Posted on October 17th, 2013 by theron • Filed under Events • 6 Comments
***UPDATE*** – The Patching Circle on Sunday will now be taking place at CRASH Space, 10526 Venice Blvd, Culver City from 3-8 PM, following MakerBot Monthly.
We have a whole weekend (plus) of Pure Data / Raspberry Pi events coming up November 13th – 17th.
What is Pure Data? Pure Data (Pd) is an open source, visual programming language geared towards musicians and artists, but it can be used for most anything. It is the free version of Cycling 74′s Max/MSP, but it runs on just about any computer, even the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer that runs Linux and connects to your television. Combined with Pd, it can be used as an embedded noise toy, a guitar effects pedal, or just as a cheap portable way to play with Pure Data.
Wednesday 11/13, we are crashing Learn To Code With Us and talking about Pure Data, and can help anyone install and start to learn.
Thursday 11/14, we will be having a “Get Started With Pure Data And Raspberry Pi” night where we can help people install and test Pd on their laptop and/or Raspberry Pi – to get ready for the weekend’s workshops, or just because.
Friday 11/15, there are activities in San Diego – a discussion with Miller Puckette, and a family night at the Clairmont Boys & Girls Club.
Saturday 11/16, we have FOUR workshops with special guest instructors.
Miller Puckette, creator of Pure Data (Pd) will be showing the latest tips and tricks for using Pure Data on the Raspberry Pi.
Katja Vetter will show how to build a quality unidirectional DIY microphone suitable for live recording, and how to use it with Slice//Jockey, a live sampling Pure Data patch.
Ico Bukvic will teach a workshop appropriate for ages 10 and up covering an introduction to Pd-L2ork interactive visual programming environment and its K12 eduction module.
Unlocking Computer Creativity for musicians and creative types using the Pure Data programming language for a minimum of cryptic code and other off-putting digital peculiarities.
Each workshop is three hours long and costs $75 (except for the microphone workshop, which has a $5 materials fee). CRASH Space members receive discounts on workshop fees (see members list for details).
Saturday night (5:30 – 9:30 PM), we will be having Handmade Music 4.0, with performances by our guest instructors and local musicians. FREE!
Sunday (Noon – 8 PM) will be our special patching circle with our special guests, featuring performances and demonstrations, as well as the usual patching. FREE!
Tickets for the workshops, and RSVP for Handmade Music and the patching circle are available at our Eventbrite page.
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