Browsers for Mission Zero - which ones? - online safety?

[Anne_Carlill]

I've decided to have a go at Mission Zero with our Code Club. I go in once a week so I don't have much influence on what is available on our Windows laptops. At my home, the Trinket website seems to work well on Edge but not so well on IE 11 (Internet Explorer 11). At school I've got older laptops that are Windows 7, I think, and heaven knows what version of IE it is. Also, besides http://trinket.io , Trinket lists another 8 web sites that need to be available and the www.raspberrypi.org site lists another possible 4 which might be needed. How are other people dealing with the availability of the necessary websites and the online safety of their school pupils?

[bensimmo]

If you can get Chrome installed, that's the way to go or Edge of course.

As an idea
On you school PCs you could ask/see if you can boot from a USB stick or CD (we cannot as usb or turned off for safety). If you don't need the Internet it's an idea.
You could then have them boot to a Pi desktop using the x86 version. This comes with everything you need as you can use sense-emu to emulate the SenseHat from IDLE or Thonny.

Of course both these need help from the school/club.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/r ... i-desktop/

[bensimmo]

I've just tried all 3 here at school and while Edge and IE11 don't have the 3D style of SenseHat, it seems to work fine.
It would be nice if EDGE worked better.
Still they seem usable.

What's not working in you IE computers

trinket.io/sense-hat

[Anne_Carlill]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your ideas. I'll try to get Chrome I think. Trinket just looks untidy in IE 11. The boxes overlap other print and the three item checklist doesn't all turn green when you've run good code. I have had no problems with Edge. We can write our code offline, on the R Pi but Mission Zero entries can only be submitted via Trinket as far as I know. Thanks anyway and hope to bump into you at Hull Rasp Jam again.

[B.Goode]

Could you provide a link to what Mission Zero is? My Google search has failed me.

It seems odd that if the competition or activity is reputable that it would need such widespread access to third-party websites.

[bensimmo]

Take your pick,
The blog https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/announ ... -astro-pi/
The astro-pi page https://astro-pi.org/missions/zero/
The Trinket page https://trinket.io/mission-zero
or the more useful step by step project page https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/pro ... sion-zero/


The mission page has
google tracking (not needed)
scratchblocks javascript (?)http://scratchblocks.github.io/

trinket also gas twitter/facebook/linkedin (not needed)
CloudFlare (no idea, but also has a warning [Deprecation] Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to the end user's experience. For more help, check https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/.
send @ jquery.js:8554 )
trinket.io , astro-pi.org , raspberrypi..., ESA, gov.uk
a google font, google tracking etc.

In schools a lot might get flagged up, but it's the sort of mess a page ends up in we have to live with as they get blocked by nannies.

[B.Goode]

Thanks for that.

[Anne_Carlill]

Thanks again Ben. I'm really enjoying this Sense HAT activity. I hope the pupils do too.

[Davespice]

Just to chime in here, we have had one report of the .io top level domain being blocked in a school. This may be because of agar.io which was a popular time waster game a while back. If that block is in place in your school you will not be able to access the Mission Zero code editor which uses a .io domain.

If you check out the Mission Zero FAQ the answer to the question "The Mission Zero code editor is blocked at my school, what can I do?" lists the domains that need to be white-listed if you have really tight safeguarding.

These are:

• trinket.io = Trinket are our partner who developed the Sense HAT emulator software under contract with Raspberry Pi
• astro-pi.org = The main Astro Pi website where submission forms are located
• www.esa.int = The European Space Agency are our partner who provide access to the ISS and astronauts, they also host some educational resources
• esamultimedia.esa.int = An ESA multimedia server which hosts the official guideline documents
• www.raspberrypi.org = Some Astro Pi educational resource are located on the main Raspberry Pi website
• projects.raspberrypi.org = Some Astro Pi educational resource are located on the new Raspberry Pi /learning website

It seems odd that if the competition or activity is reputable that it would need such widespread access to third-party websites.

Hopefully the above explanations are enough to convince you that it's a reputable project

If that's not enough, how about these tweets from the UK Space Agency and British ESA astronaut Tim Peake?
https://twitter.com/spacegovuk/status/9 ... 9463615488
https://twitter.com/astro_timpeake/stat ... 3488015361

[Anne_Carlill]

Thanks davespice . That really helps!