Category: Teaching
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Future Thinking for Social Living: Weavecoding in assisted housing
Our work on weavecoding is now reaching out to other uses and projects. One is Future Thinking for Social Living, run by Magda Tyżlik-Carver and Fiona Hackney. This research project aims to look at the relationship between wellbeing, home, making and technology and is centred on Miners Court, who provide assisted housing in Redruth in…
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Easter Python/Minecraft programming day at dbsCode
Thursday saw our second dbsCode Easter programming taster, and like last year we focused on minecraft programming with our procedural architecture api. The main change this time was that for the 20 11-16 year old participants we doubled our teachers to 4 (Glen Pike, Francesca Sargent and Matthew Dodkins and me), plus a couple of…
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Training teachers in coding at Truro School
I’m part of a UK Department of Education funded project to join up 10 primary schools in Cornwall and get them programming. The teachers are very important people in this equation, so our first activity was a training day for them. The idea of this was to get them familiar with using the Raspberry Pi…
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Tangible livecoding tests in the wild, and material as type in programming
Last week I took the flotsam tangible livecoding system to my programming tutoring lesson for some first tests with the real experts. To provide some background, we started a while back with Raspberry Pi, messing around with the Minecraft API and python and we’ve recently moved on to laptops and pygame. I arrived with the…
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Learning to read, notate and compute textiles in Aarhus
Setting off from Copenhagen, the weaving codes tour continued as Emma Cocker, Alex McLean, Ellen Harlizius-Klück and I sped across the Danish countryside on the train. We were heading for Aarhus to spend some time working with people at the other end of the technology spectrum – The Center for Participatory IT in Aarhus University.…
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Screen-less programming language (#3)
Since the last update I’ve connected the Raspberry Pi to the board, and after a bit of debugging I have a python script that polls bytes (more accurately 4 bit ‘nibbles’) via the GPIO ports from 16 addresses. I didn’t blow up the Pi, although I did cause hard resets a couple of times with…
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A talk on citizen science games and teaching programming
From earlier in the year at Thinking Digital 2014 in Gateshead.
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Thinking outside of the screen (#1)
I’m starting a new exploratory project to build a screen-less programming language based on two needs: A difficulty with teaching kids programming in my CodeClub where they become lost ‘in the screen’. It’s a challenge (for any of us really but for children particularly) to disengage and think differently – e.g. to draw a diagram…
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dBsCode summer school
At the end of July I helped out with the dbscode summer school. The idea of this two week course was to encourage algorithmic literacy, with focus on employment – agile methods and test driven development (TDD), and aiming at people about to enter, or re-enter employment rather than the teenagers we focused on in…
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Why teach Kids Coding? (Royal Cornwall Show update)
On Saturday I teamed up with Falmouth University’s Makernow team to do a kids coding event at the Royal Cornwall Show with a new Raspberry Pi cube (based on the one used at the DeerShed Festival last year). We had a constant stream of families and kids wanting to try Scratch coding, and we had…