Five of us met for the first time on Friday 28th October 2016 in The Runway cafe at Martlesham Heath. Everyone had a good time - with coffee and cake. It's really a social event with cake and coffee, but with a variety of computing related activities.
In our case, Codgers do not need to be either male or ancient! Coding for Codgers will be open to anyone.
Your children and/or grandchildren at school are learning 'Coding' - ie how to write computer programs. We have played with the same computers - which only cost £10 to £20. No experience necessary - this is not going to be a serious training course, it's just for fun.
In the following sections you can see some of the things we have played with. This is not intended as a complete description of our projects, just snapshots to remind us what we have done.
The current conversations cover, amongst other things
Please keep an eye on this website in case of any cancellations. You could still head for the Runway cafe for cake and coffee even if there are no other 'Codgers' around. There's always someone there for a chat.
For more information, contact Ken@CodingForCodgers.co.uk
This warning triangle shows the computer we first played with. It costs less than £10. The program controls the three lights and the pattern depends on the code you write.
It contains a PICAXE computer (see What is PICAXE for more information).
Schoolchildren are being given these to play with and learn about programming - so we thought we would try. We now have the traffic lights controlled by a BBC Micro Bit.
Among other things, we've been working on programs to solve Sudoku puzzles. There is an intellectual challenge in solving Sudoku puzzles. The challenge here is firstly to work out how we would do it on paper, then write programs to automate the process.
Here's a selection of web pages which run our programs to solve the puzzles. As time goes by we will add new ones which should be able to solve the more difficult problems.
Now we are stuck! If you click puzzle X1 or X2 then click Solve, the program will get stuck and not find a solution.
Can you finish them by hand? If so, please let us know what you did - and more importantly why you did it.
If we know the method used, we can include that in the program and it should be able to solve the more difficult puzzles. As we can't solve them by hand, we don' know what next to put in the program.
We can make a guess and find the solution, but that counts as cheating. Sudoku puzzles should all be solved by logic - with no guessing
Have a look at our latest program s109.htm. Click on any of the buttons from "Puzzle 1" downwards to see a puzzle - which will have all the potential values in the empty squares. Click "Solve" and the puzzle will be solved.
Try X1 or X2 and you will find that "Solve" gets so far, then gets
stuck. In X1, you can guess at "5" for the bottom right "25".
Click the "25" and an input box (with "2 5") and update button will appear at the top right.
Change the "2 5" to "5" and click the Update button.
Click "Solve" again and the puzzle will be completed.
The challenge is to find the solution without guessing. If you can do that, and explain how you did it, then we can build your new rules into the program and it should be able to solve other puzzles.
REWARD Free coffee and cake for the first person with a solution!
We built a set of traffic lights - including a pedestrian crossing light
The lights are built out of Lego and yellow sticky tape. The computer is a PICAXE 18M2 ( a larger version of the computer for the Warning Triangle) and the program is written in PICAXE's very basic form of Basic