Hi,
My ten year old is really smart but has great difficulty focusing on one thing. He just got a Pi laptop and I'm hoping that because he is absolutely obsessed with football results and statistics (UK football, not American) maybe I can inspire him in to programming by suggesting a football results program.
My problem is that unlike him, I'm not really smart, so I need some advice or for someone to point me in the right direction. I thought that if he could create something that he can enter the football results in to and they will feed in to a results table with all the goal differences and points etc, that would be great. But then I thought maybe thats just a spreadsheet...?
Can anyone advise me if this sort of thing is possible? And would we do it using Python?
Thanks for any help!
Crum
Re: Advice needed for a beginner.
A largely non-technical answer...
Maybe there are a couple of requirements or triggers for getting anyone, but especially a young person, into a new hobby or interest.
One is a self-fuelled drive or interest in accomplishing something.
The other is a guide or mentor to demonstrate not the technical issues but intangibles such persistence and troubleshooting.
So maybe you could tackle this in parallel? You might choose to use a spreadsheet, or Scratch on your older RPi. And you could encourage your son to build a solution in Python or one of the dozens of other Programming languages that can run on the RPi.
Maybe there are a couple of requirements or triggers for getting anyone, but especially a young person, into a new hobby or interest.
One is a self-fuelled drive or interest in accomplishing something.
The other is a guide or mentor to demonstrate not the technical issues but intangibles such persistence and troubleshooting.
So maybe you could tackle this in parallel? You might choose to use a spreadsheet, or Scratch on your older RPi. And you could encourage your son to build a solution in Python or one of the dozens of other Programming languages that can run on the RPi.
Re: Advice needed for a beginner.
Sorry, it sounds a bit tedious to enter football scores manually. How about using the Pi to show live football scores from the internet?
There is a free data feed at https://www.scorespro.com/rss/live-soccer.xml Right now it only shows final scores for some matches in Brazil, but it is 2am in Britain!
I experimented with Node-Red on the Raspberry Pi to access this feed. I like Node-Red because you don't do much programming, you just draw lines to connect building blocks.
It took me 10 minutes to install a node (the building block, node-red-node-feedparser) to connect to that feed and show the data, without any formatting or filtering, on a web page on my Pi. Not quite that quick for a total beginner of course.
Next steps might be to display it nicely, filter out leagues he isn't interested in, play the famous "gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll" sound when a goal happens, save final scores into a database, etc.
Is there a CodeClub near you? https://www.codeclub.org.uk/about You and he should be able to get support and advice from them.
There is a free data feed at https://www.scorespro.com/rss/live-soccer.xml Right now it only shows final scores for some matches in Brazil, but it is 2am in Britain!
I experimented with Node-Red on the Raspberry Pi to access this feed. I like Node-Red because you don't do much programming, you just draw lines to connect building blocks.
It took me 10 minutes to install a node (the building block, node-red-node-feedparser) to connect to that feed and show the data, without any formatting or filtering, on a web page on my Pi. Not quite that quick for a total beginner of course.
Next steps might be to display it nicely, filter out leagues he isn't interested in, play the famous "gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll" sound when a goal happens, save final scores into a database, etc.
Is there a CodeClub near you? https://www.codeclub.org.uk/about You and he should be able to get support and advice from them.
Re: Advice needed for a beginner.
Thanks for the answers guys! I found a python project online that will go nicely with the live scores... That should be a great project for us to work on.