Talk about a wearer of many hats, this week’s special guest on Digital Making at Home is a long-time friend of the Raspberry Pi Foundation who is inspiring young people in the classroom, one line of code at a time! You may know him as “The Nerdy Teacher”, but we know him as Nick Provenzano, and he joined Mr. C and Christina on the stream to talk about his journey from being “a dyslexic english teacher who didn’t know how to code” to now being a Google Certified Innovator, Raspberry Pi Certified Educator, TED-Ed Innovative Educator and more! 

Nick talked about his 16 years of experience being an english teacher and how making an LED blink for the first time at our Picademy educator program changed his life. He works with 6th graders and finds it so important to show his students that making is part of life the same way that going to school, having a job, raising a family, etc. are all parts of life. We were also lucky enough to see some of the projects that Nick has made like a Raspberry Pi Airplay device! 

Conversations with people like Nick are the ones that inspire people to try their hands at making new things, and we hope that you walk away from this week’s episode feeling like you can do anything you put your mind to. We’ve got one last episode of Digital Making at Home next week, so make sure to join us live for more!

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As digital makers, we can’t help but to explore the ways in which computing relates to the world around us, even the world of social media! If you’re not someone who interacts with social media platforms like Twitter, this episode of Digital Making at Home might pique your curiosity. Not only that, but our special guest this week will give you a number of ways that you can use social media creatively to develop your digital making skills! 

Mr. C and Christina welcomed Helen Leigh, tech creator and author of The Crafty Kids Guide to DIY Electronics, to talk about her background in physical computing, share some our her own creations, and more! Many of her projects, like a giant anxiety reduction pillow, have been featured in publications including our own HackSpace magazine. You can see more of her projects on Helen’s YouTube channel too. 

Helen showed us how to connect a Raspberry Pi and a camera to Twitter to do things like make your Raspberry Pi tweet or even send out alerts. Who knew you could use your digital making skills to manage your social media account!? We LOVED having Helen on the stream and we’ll have another amazing guest join us next week, so stay tuned for more coding! 

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Get ready for miniature musical mayhem this week on Digital Making at Home! Mr. C and Christina orchestrated a beautiful conversation with our special guests, the kids from the GurgleApps family. It was all about making music with code. The GurgleApps family, consisting of siblings Amelie, Caleb, and Ziva, had such an inspirational story to share with us that really encouraged us to have more fun trying new things! 

Amelie, the eldest sibling, started coding when her father gave her a Raspberry Pi and from there, she was hooked. For her younger brother Caleb, he took a liking to making circuits and even created a gadget that he placed under their door mat that would buzz him if anyone stepped on it. Ziva, the youngest sister, has been having a blast learning under her siblings who helped her make a fan with a motor for her first project. It’s so amazing to see siblings working together to create such incredible projects! They not only code together, but they also have a YouTube channel where they aim to help other kids learn how to code.

Speaking of teaching, the GurgleApps family even showed us how to make an electronic piano using a Raspberry Pi Pico, along with the help of Mr. C. This is the perfect project to try out with your family and friends, so make sure to give it a shot. 

We’ll see you next week for more Digital Making at Home!

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There’s a whole world to explore outdoors and this week at Digital Making at Home, we’re using our digital exploring skills to see what’s hiding outside in the wild! Of course Mr. C and Christina guided us through this adventure, but we also had a number of special guest appearances throughout the stream who shared with us along the way! 

For starters, we met Fergus from the Raspberry Pi Foundation who showed us a nature cam he put together himself using a Raspberry Pi. What a great way to find out what types of unique creatures visit your backyard! We had a blast hearing from Ellora, a fellow maker and YouTuber who loves using her digital making skills to create projects that inspire people to interact with the outdoors. She’s the Managing Director of Envirocache, which is an app Ellora created to gamify the outdoors and inspire a community of explorers. 

That’s not all, but we also heard from another Digital Making at Home correspondent, Alex J’rassic! The projects that Alex shared with us will blow your mind. All of the projects featured Raspberry Pis and they highlighted different aspects of the outdoors. 

To wrap up this wild adventure of an episode, Mr. C walked us through how we can make our own wildlife camera. Talk about an action-packed adventure! Make sure you share your projects with us at dmah@raspberrypi.org and maybe we’ll have you on the next episode of Digital Making at Home!

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There’s so much magic in the world and on this week’s episode of Digital Making at Home, we got to combine some of that magic with code! To show us just how perfectly magic and coding work together, Mr. C and Christina invited Mario the Maker Magician to the stream. Mario is not only one of the most magical people you’ll ever meet, but he also loves 3D design, 3D printing, animation, robotics, and more! Mario started practicing magician in his 20’s as a street magician and now is a full-time magician. We had a blast talking with Mario and of course, he showed us a few magic tricks that will blow your mind! 

A few of us here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation also dabble in a bit of magic, including Mr. C! He showed us a magic card trick that you can code in Scratch to bring the magic of today’s episode to your friends and family. That’s all for this week, but stay tuned to see what new and exciting things happen next on Digital Making at Home!

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Our most recent episode of Digital Making at Home was all about using our digital making skills to take control, remotely! And what did we learn to take over control of? Robots, drones, RC cars, and so much more! Mr. C and Christina welcomed Stan, co-founder of Surrogate.tv, which is a platform that lets you connect robotics to the internet and control them remotely from anywhere in the world in real-time. He joined the live stream from their studio in Finland and even gave us a live tour of their office, where they have over 150 Raspberry Pi computers running all kinds of fun games! 

There were so many amazing gadgets and games to see, so make sure you check out the playback if you weren’t able to catch it live. Before the stream wrapped up, Mr. C walked us through how to use the Surrogate.tv platform to remotely control a Raspberry Pi powered buggy. Once he set everything up where he is in Cambridge, England, Christina was able to control the buggy all the way from Nebraska! We even had a few Digital Making at Home viewers take over control too. Give this project a try with your friends and let us know how it goes!

Don’t forget to tune in this week to learn about making magic! We’ll see you then, digital makers!

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This week on Digital Making at Home was a snapshot of just how versatile a Raspberry Pi computer can be! Mr. C and Christina started off the stream by welcoming back a young digital maker and fellow streamer who actually reached out to us to share the amazing things they’ve made using code! Al brought so much energy to this stream and was very excited to talk about their journey from making video games to now working on web pages, robots, servers, and so much more! It was so special to hear from such a multi-talented young person who is pushing the envelope when it comes to creating new things. Don’t forget, if you want to share your projects on the show, you can email us!

We also had a surprise visit from Rob Zwetsloot from The Magpi magazine! He had some of his favorite camera-themed projects to show us, including a seeing wand that uses a camera to try to determine what you’re pointing it at! These were some of the most clever projects we’ve seen on the live stream, so you’ll definitely want to check this out. Before we wrapped up, Mr. C and Christina showed us how to get started with using a Picamera, specifically to take time-lapse photos! Here are all the details on how to make your own.

What an exciting episode this week! You can catch us again next week for more digital making!

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On this week of Digital Making at Home, we’re geeking out with our special guest Dalia Awad, a young programmer from Gaza in Palestine! She talked to us about her journey to becoming a geek, starting with her taking technology courses with a company in Gaza when she was 15 years old. It was here that she built her first circuit, which was a traffic light! From that point forward, she was hooked: she won first place with her friends in a robot competition, she developed her own software, and so much more! Dalia has had quite the amazing journey so far, which she’s written about in this article.

For this week’s code-along, Mr C and Christina showed us how to get our motors running using the new Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. This is a great starting point for any young coders who are thinking about building their own drone, buggy, rover, or robot. 

Catch them next week for another awesome episode of Digital Making at Home!

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It’s time to use code in order to make your computer is safe for you and your family to use! You might be used to hearing about hacking as a bad thing, but this week on Digital Making at Home we’re learning about “ethical hacking” from our special guest Katie, who is a cybersecurity expert! Fun fact: she’s currently getting a Ph.D. in cybersecurity and must defend her thesis in two weeks, so send her all the good thoughts! Katie shared that as an ethical hacker, she pretends to be a hacker, figures out what issues she could cause in a system, and reports back to the developers who own run the system to let them know how they can make their code even more secure. It was so amazing learning about her story; she’s feels like her brain is wired for computers! 

Mr. C and Christina also showed us how to use Scratch to code a password safety program. It is so important to keep your passwords updated so that all of your accounts aren’t compromised. This is a topic that Mr. C is passionate about and he even gave a TEDx talk that was focused on “Teaching Kids Tech-Fu”. It’s so great to know that so many people are working hard to make sure the internet is safe for us all! 

Join us next week for more learning, coding, and creating together!

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It’s time to get crafty this week on Digital Making at Home, and we’ve got the perfect special guest! Mr. C and Christina spoke with Debra from Geek Mom Projects. Her workshop space was beaming with all sorts of lights from the many projects she’s put together, from wearables to LED creatures and more! She’s always looking for exciting projects to try out on her own or with her kids! You can see many of these projects on her blog, which she started to inspire people to try new things. 

She recently came up with her own project using LED fairy string lights and actually showed Mr. C and Christina how to make an infinity mirror LED fairy light creature! Christina even followed along with Debra to create her own LED creature. If you’re coding along with this project, you should definitely consider submitting it for this year’s Coolest Projects! 

That’s all for this week, but we’ll be back for more next Wednesday! See you then, digital makers!

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