Category: Teaching
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Creative Design Informatics for Horticultural Awareness at the End of the World Garden
Thanks to Paul Chaney who runs The End of the World Garden, we had an opportunity to trial a short workshop based on our Farm Crap App and prototype Allotment Lab on his two-acre forest garden site in Cornwall. This was our contribution to the Bank Holiday Weekend Haymaking Extravaganza (along with a bit of…
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Technology after Collapse
The philosophy underlying contemporary ‘seamless’ technology production seems to be one of endless energy, bountiful resources and waste being someone else’s problem. Naive working assumptions of some form are a requirement when designing for the future, but do we believe in these enough now to make them useful? Flashy ‘aspirational’ tech videos of ever thinning…
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A tanglebots workshop report
I’ve tried a lot of different ways of teaching children programming, starting a few years ago with primary school children in a classroom, then doing inset training days for teachers and finally private tutoring in homes. For the finale to the weavingcodes project we are trying a new approach, teaching families about code, robotics and…
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Tanglebots workshop preparation
It’s workshop time again at Foam Kernow. We’re running a Sonic Kayak development open hacklab with Kaffe Matthews (more on this soon) and a series of tanglebots workshops which will be the finale to the weavingcodes project. Instead of using my cobbled together homemade interface board, we’re using the pimoroni explorer hat (pro). This comes…
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Red King: Host/Parasite co-evolution citizen science
A new project begins, on the subject of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. This one is a little different from a lot of Foam Kernow’s citizen science projects in that the subject is theoretical research – and involves mathematical simulations of populations of co-evolving organisms, rather than the direct study of real ones in…
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Quipu: further experiments in Dusseldorf
A report on further experimentation with Julian Rohrhuber and his students at the Institute for Music and Media in Dusseldorf during our coding with weaves and knots remote seminar this week. As we have so little idea what the Inca are telling us in their Quipu, it seems appropriate to add a cryptanalysis approach to…
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Photos from the machine wilderness workshop
Busy times at Foam Kernow, here are some photos from the Machine Wilderness Workshop weekend before last. This was a project between Foam Amsterdam and us, with 30 participants from all over the place geographically and professionally. My role was as facilitator, so mainly obtaining raw materials (electronic toys, recycled trash and e-waste) as well…
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Training teachers in coding, and thinking about e-waste/recycled robots
We recently had the second inset training day in programming related activities at Truro school. Following on from the previous session I didn’t want to introduce too much new stuff, so we concentrated on going back over Sonic Pi and Minecraft/Python programming in the morning, then discussed a lot more about our future workshops in…
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Picademy Exeter and Future Thinking for Social Living
Last week I had the chance to help out the Raspberry Pi foundation at their Picademy in Exeter. It was good to meet up with Sam Aaron again to talk livecoding on Pis, and also see how they run these events. They are designed for local teachers to get more confident with computers, programming and…
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Coding with knots: Inca Quipu
This week I’m teaching at IMM Düsseldorf with Julian Rohrhuber which has given me a chance to follow up a bit on Inca Quipu coding with knots, a dangling thread from the weavecoding project. Quipu are how the Incas organised their society, as they had no written texts or money – things like exchanges (for…