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List of Web Sites

This appendix lists the external websites used during GLO Coding Club meetings and referenced throughout this book, organized by category.

Groves Learning Organization

Groves Learning Organization — The nonprofit that hosts GLO Coding Club. Groves specializes in helping students with dyslexia and other learning differences build academic and life skills; the Coding Club is one of its enrichment programs. This book's fonts, colors, and button styles are matched to the main GLO site so the club feels like a natural extension of it.

Online Coding Platforms

MIT Scratch

Scratch — A free, block-based visual programming language and online community created by the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Group. Members snap together colored code blocks — instead of typing syntax — to create animations, stories, and games, then share their projects with the worldwide Scratch community. Scratch is where most GLO Coding Club members write their very first program, because it removes typing and syntax errors as a barrier to creative coding.

Code.org

Code.org — A nonprofit dedicated to expanding access to computer science, best known for organizing the annual "Hour of Code" and for free, self-paced courses that use drag-and-drop puzzles (often featuring popular game and movie characters) to teach programming concepts like loops, conditionals, and events. The club uses Code.org courses as warm-up activities and as an alternative on-ramp for members who want more structured, guided lessons than open-ended Scratch projects.

Intelligent Textbooks

Once club members are comfortable with block programming, they move on to text-based Python and MicroPython using this family of companion intelligent textbooks — each one written and maintained by the author of this book and built on the same MkDocs Material platform.

  1. Learning Python — Python fundamentals and computational thinking for beginners, with extensive use of turtle graphics; designed to be used right after students learn block programming (Scratch) and before they ever touch a breadboard.
  2. Learning MicroPython — The full MicroPython sensor, display, and motor reference catalog. This course is ideal if you have a full sensor kit (about $100).
  3. Moving Rainbow — The full NeoPixel/WS2812B LED animation pattern library on a Pico breadboard. This book assumes only a low-cost $15 kit with a NeoPixel addressable LED strip.
  4. STEM Robots — Full-semester robot chassis construction, collision avoidance, line following, and robot face display. Robot kits start about about $22 and run up to $50 with OLED displays.
  5. Robot Faces — Deep OLED facial-expression programming for robots with MicroPython.
  6. Clocks and Watches — The full 20+ display-driver catalog for building custom clocks and wearables with MicroPython and AI. This book features an entire library of different clocks and watches with a range of displays and price points.
  7. AI Racing League — Autonomous RC car ML pipelines, neural network training, and the Donkey Car framework. The price points for a single car runs about $350.
  8. Robot Day — Running a single-day, station-based robotics event for your school or club.