On Tuesday 15th December 2015, Tim Peake, the first British ESA astronaut, launched on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome.

To celebrate this, a number of Destination Space public events were being held across the UK with one at W5 in Belfast.
Myself and some of the Northern Ireland Raspberry Jam team went along and with us, brought 10 Raspberry Pis, some Sense HATs and a stack of Raspberry Pi DOTS Boards.

Rocket dots

Blastoff! New @astro_pi rocket mode included as an Easter Egg in @Raspberry_Pi Dots Minecraft program! @RachelRayns pic.twitter.com/8veSBKt0WI

— Andrew Mulholland (@gbaman1) December 15, 2015

Our most popular activity we were running on the day was as usual, the DOTS boards. For the launch, I hastily added a new Easter Egg to the RPi-dots-minecraft program, a rocket simulation!

To enable the secret mode, you simply don’t draw the wings on the plane, causing your drawing to look like a rocket!

The activity was extremely popular with over 200+ students giving it a go.

Sense HAT activity

We also brought along a set of Sense HATs and set them up with the excellent Raspberry Pi Foundation Sense HAT pixel art activity.

Although not as popular as the DOTS boards, Dean and Art were certainly kept busy helping stacks of kids create some awesome pixel art using Python!

Thanks

Big thanks to the wonderful team of Northern Ireland Raspberry Jam volunteers who were able to make it down for the day and for W5 for having us. We all had a great day!