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On Wednesday, Aber Robotics Club put on a day of coding, gaming and robotics in Old College. We ran two workshops: one on Minecraft, and one on Mindstorms (lego robots). Each had about 30 kids in, and the aim was to have a techy day that taught attendees something new, but that was also fun: it was a summer holiday workshop after all. In the Mindstorms lego robots workshop we did a mixture of activities – most of which I’ve blogged about before. We did the “program a humanoid robot” exercise, where we get kids to write down programs for their parents (who end upRead More →

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Last weekend was Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s main Hacker/maker camp. It’s an outstanding opportunity for meeting up with tinkerers, coders and makers from across the UK and beyond. I was at the first EMF (in 2012, blog post here) talking about women in tech, and went back to this one to talk about schools outreach and the work we’re doing with kids and families. I spoke about schools and kids engagement in general, but also more specifically about our EU playfulcoding project. You can see my talk here: And you can view the slides here, if you just want slides, not talk. The talk wasRead More →

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Early last Sunday I left sunny mid-Wales for the last ever meeting in our EU Erasmus+ project “Early Mastery/Playful Coding”. We flew from Bristol to Girona with Ryanair (who call Girona “Barcelona”, which gives some clue to its location). The cloud cover cleared as soon as we crossed the channel, and the view from the airplane was rather lovely. The Pyrenees in particular were stunning. Once in Girona we met up with the Ysgol Bro Hyddgen crew, teachers from the school up the road in Machynlleth. A chatty evening spent in a lovely riverside bar rounded off the day of travel nicely. Monday morning, brightRead More →

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I gave a talk today about using short videos in teaching, to the Aberystwyth University Teaching and Learning conference (info here). The conference is an annual event which serves as a showcase for best practice in the uni, and it’s always interesting to see what people are up to. As part of my prep for the talk I did a lot of thinking about the different uses of video in learning and teaching, and about the different types of video I’ve put together. So I thought I’d do a blog post about that. If you’re interested in the how, as well as the what andRead More →

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Soapbox Science is a public engagement event designed to get scientists out into the public and into public spaces, talking about their work. It’s supposed to demystify science (a bit) but also to change people’s perceptions of what scientists look like; one of the ways it does this is by making all of the scientists on the soapbox women. When I heard about it, I thought… Public engagement? Women in Science? Sounds a bit mad? Guess I’d better apply then! The event I applied for was my nearest one, this year, and that was Cardiff, and it was yesterday. As you can probably guess fromRead More →

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I’m just back from our penultimate project meeting on the Playful Coding project. It’s been a good year-and-a-bit of working, playing, talking to kids, and talking to teachers. After the last week we’ve really made progress on our main output too, which is a book for teachers and people who want to engage school-aged students with programming and computational thinking using playful workshops. The Wales team this session were myself, Wayne Aubrey and Nigel Hardy from Aberystwyth University, and Tomi Rowlands, Sam Roberts, and Gwennan Philips from Ysgol Bro Hyddgen in Machynlleth. One of the real wins of projects like this is the extra timeRead More →

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A Lightstage is a system which lets you completely control illumination in a particular space, and capture images from multiple views. They’re used for high resolution graphics capture and computer vision, and they’re fairly rare. I don’t think there are many non-commercial ones in the UK, and they’re research kit (which means you can’t really just go out and buy one, you’ve got to actually build it). Usually, Lightstages are used for facial feature capture, but I’m kinda interested to use them with plants. With the support of the National Plant Phenomics Centre, here in Aberystwyth, and and Aberystwyth University Research Fund grant (URF) I’veRead More →

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I’ve been helping out at Aber Robotics Club this year, which is a weekly after school club for local schoolkids. We got invited down to do a workshop in Pembrokeshire as part of “The Cheerful Project” who put on workshops in rural Pembrokeshire, so Steve filled his boot with Lego Mindstorms, got up early on a Saturday, met up with me and with Martin (our new institute schools outreach guy who doesn’t have a webpage yet) and we headed south to somewhere I’d never heard of. Whilst I’m not a huge fan of 7am starts on a Saturday, the weather was glorious and you can’tRead More →

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The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium was last week, in Sheffield. This is a collection of links to reports and so on. As usual I was the conference chair, and my official blog report is now on the BCSWomen site. SO pop over there and read that, then come back for the link roundup. The event hashtag saw a lot of traffic: https://twitter.com/hashtag/BCSLL16?src=hash A storify of the day has been put together by Sue Beckingham (@suebecks) https://storify.com/suebecks/the-bcswomen-lovelace-colloquium-bcsll16 Sheffield Hallam have created a nice youtube video which gives a good taste of the event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lejx6zZiRa8&feature=youtu.be The photos (collected from three cameras, or rather, two cameras and a phone!)Read More →

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We’re just back from a playful coding EU Erasmus+ meeting in Le Creusot, France. The project is really coming together now: we’ve been up and running for nearly a year and the project website now has a lot of content and we’re beginning to pull together a teacher’s guide. The aim of last week’s meeting was to look at how different people implemented the activities in different contexts, to check that the information we have is good enough for people to pick up and use our workshops, and to think through next steps for the teacher’s guide. It’s been a busy week of thinking, talking,Read More →