Monthly Archives: December 2016

Celebrating SparkMacon Makerspace Community in 2016

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SparkMacon 3D Print

Happy Holidays everyone!  We wanted to share a few memories and pictures from our community outreach in 2016 and workshops.   We’ve also included pictures from our road trip to Atlanta Maker Faire.  We’re very thankful to our team and community members who continue to grow Macon as a Maker City!

From my perspective, I enjoy seeing new relationships and friendships form through our coworking/makerspace.   Our team also enjoys seeing the growth of our maker businesses, our young makers, and creatives.   It’s a true joy to connect and support our Macon makers.   We want to thank Real Impact and our volunteer teams for their service to coach young makers to grow their creativity.   We also want to thank our team members who lead our start-up community events like Young Entrepreneurs Academy,  .NET users group,Creative Entrepreneur Meetups and other community networking events.

We’re looking forward to growing the Macon Makers movement together in 2017!

Merry Christmas to you and your family!

Onward and upward!

The SparkMacon Team

Tiz the Season To Code a Christmas Song

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Music

Hi, friends! Hope that you and your family have a very Merry Christmas. Last week, we celebrated National computer science week. In schools over the world, kids and adults had their first exposure to the fundamentals of computer science: putting commands in order, looping, breaking problems into smaller parts, and decision making.  Make sure to check out the great learning resources at Code.org .

I have to confess that Christmas is one of my favorite seasons because of the music.   Growing up, my parents provided me and my brother a precious gift of teaching us music.  I started playing violin at age five, learned cocktail piano with my mom in high school, and started coaching choirs in college.   Music is in my soul.   Christmas is just a wonderful time to be a music maker.

There’s a really fun tool by Sam Aaron and University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory that teaches music theory and computer science called Sonic Pi.  This tool does an amazing job of helping students understand music theory concepts by building songs with code.   The software uses the Ruby programming language and has brief and fun tutorials to inspire the student to make electronic music while coding.   You can learn more about Sonic Pi in our blog post here.   Sonic Pi runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Raspberry Pi.

There’s also a great ebook from our friends at MagPi on Sonic Pi.  MagPi is a great resource for students, makers, and parents who enjoy Raspberry Pi.

Here’s your mission if you choose to accept it

I wanted to offer a coding challenge to students, parents, and makers who follow our blog.  Try coding up a Christmas or Holiday song.   I found that it was a fun exercise since it requires you to think about melody line building, timing, and coding.

To help inspire your imagination, I have coded up the classic song: Silent Night.   Download Sonic Pi, copy the code from here into Sonic Pi, and listen.    There’s a track for the melody and the track for chords.

Hope you enjoy this challenge!  Make sure to share your creations in the comments below!

Silent Night using Sonic Pi / Ruby

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