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Making Engineering Playful in Schools [report]

This booklet presents findings from a research collaboration between Tufts University, members of the CEEO, the International School of Billund (ISB), and the LEGO Foundation that focused on how making and makerspaces can promote playful learning in schools. It is intended to help educators, administrators, and researchers continue to explore how students can learn by designing and making things.

Over the course of 2-years, researchers from Tufts partnered with teachers and students from ISB to explore different aspects of making and makerspaces in schools. These included early childhood makerspaces, appropriate tools, technologies, and materials for making, and ways of thinking about assessment, narrative, and representation in making processes.

The document "tells the story of making" at ISB, and offers vignettes and guiding principals for making engineering playful in other schools across the world.

Read the full report here.

Microsoft Maker Space at #BETT2017 [@BETT_Show @microsofteduk]

I was really impressed with the Microsoft Maker Space at BETT 2017.

It was packed full of practical and fun activities for both kids and adults to try out.

I think my favourite was the robotic hand (see the video below). But there was also some really nice stuff for geography teachers on Using Computational Thinking to Understand Earthquakes and Analysing Wind Speed with Anemometers.

All of the resources are free and a new lesson plan is being released each month.

You can view the current list of resources at aka.ms/hackingstem.

 

New ‘Hello World’ Magazine & tribute to Seymour Papert [#BETT2017 @BETT_show @Raspberry_Pi]

 

I picked up a copy of the new ‘Hello World’ Magazine at BETT 2017.

The magazine is a collaboration between  The Raspberry Pi Foundation, Computing At School (CAS), The BCS Academy of Computing and British Telecom (BT).

Hello World is a magazine about computing and digital making written by educators, for educators. With three issues each year, it contains 100 pages filled with news, features, teaching resources, reviews, research and much more.

It is designed to be cross-curricular and useful to all kinds of educators, from classroom teachers to librarians.

Now here is the best bit. It is also my favorite price... FREE, forever, for everyone online as a downloadable pdf.  

This first issue is dedicated to Seymour Papert, in many ways the godfather of computing education (and lots of other things!). Papert was the creator of the Logo programming language and the author of some of the most important research on the role of computers in education. Inside the first edition you will find articles exploring Papert’s influence on how we think about learning, on the rise of the maker movement, and on the software that is used to teach computing today from Scratch to Greenfoot.

You can subscribe to Hello World here and due to sponsorship from BT you can also get a nice glossy version of the first three editions straight to your door!

On the subject of Seymour Papert (February 29, 1928 – July 31, 2016). Here is a nice little video about this great man's work from the Lego Foundation.

 

Reflections from the #IntelVisionaries Launch Event, October 2015: 2 of 17 – Student innovation Panel

This is part of a short series of posts where I reflect on the inaugural Intel Education Visionaries meet up in Santa Clara, California in October 2015.

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An ongoing theme of the conference was ‘making’ and ‘tinkering’ – two topics very close to my heart and after John Galvin’s keynote presentation we had a chance to hear from four young people who were self-confessed ‘makers’.

Riana, Riya, Sasha and Shubham all spoke well and they all had an interesting story to tell about their making and digital exploits. I would go into precise detail here but their collective experience included app development, website development, starting code clubs for younger children, making robots (one that could explore and map a cave!) and sophisticated robotics (including the creation of a braille printer made out of Lego!).

 

The presentations were interesting for three reasons.

Firstly, they were are great reminder that young people can do amazing things when they put their mind to it and we need to work harder than ever in schools to make sure that we don’t suppress creativity.

Secondly, it was obvious to me how much the role of the school or district ‘science fair’ has an impact on the US school system. To my knowledge, Science fairs aren’t really that popular in the UK but listening to the young people on the panel I could really see how an annual event might be helpful?

Finally, despite all of the young people having a long list of very noticeable achievements and all of them speaking passionately about how one or more teachers had influence their practice at school. All of the activities they described were completed pretty much in their own time or as a form of extra-curricular activity.

In terms of my own practice as we work hard at Kingussie to bring our maker space up to full capacity I’m absolutely determined to ensure that young people will be able to access it in curriculum time, for curriculum projects as well as an extra-curricular activity.

A massive well-done to all the Young People on the panel – it was great to have student voice at the heart of such an important conference.

Raspberry Pi Projects on Pinterest [@raspberry_pi]

I'm a big fan of the Raspberry Pi and we have invested in a class set (with potable monitors) at Kingussie. We are using the Raspberry Pi's for various computing / maker projects at the moment. I am also enthusiastic about other similar devices such at the Intel Galileo and the new BBC MicroBit.

"The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games."

"What’s more, the Raspberry Pi  has the ability to interact with the outside world, and has been  used in a wide array of digital maker projects, from music machines and parent detectors to weather stations and tweeting birdhouses with infra-red cameras. We want to see the Raspberry Pi being used by kids all over the world to learn to program and understand how computers work."

You can make lots of cool stuff with a Raspberry Pi and I recently discovered that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has a Pinterest Board where that showcase some of the coolest Pi Projects. My favourite is the board on Games and Gaming but I also like the one on Wearables, Textiles and Fibres.

 

Magic Moments #27 - Ullapool High School Maker Space

Snapped this during a Quality Improvement visit to Ullapool High School last December. Ullapool High School is great wee school in an absolutely stunning location led by my pal Robbie McFedries.

The school is well designed and makes use of all available space. Up in the roof they have their SQA examinations room, S6 Common Room and some sort of Maker Space that was used for cart club and other big projects.

We going to build a Maker Space at my school in Kingussie this year - watch this space.

Its great to have a chance to visit other schools both in your local area and further afield.