Surrounded by robots

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A couple of weekends ago we (Aberystwyth Robotics) held our annual “Beachlab” event. Usually, this is a hands-on event with robots and activities on the promenade. This year, we had to relocate to the campus because of COVID issues, and the robots were strictly hands-off for attendees. It was a bit like a pop-up robot museum, rather than an interactive display, but hey that’s better than nothing. This was the first outing for our new robotic submarine Afanc (which means “Beaver” in Welsh). Here I am talking about how the sub works: And here I am posing with the submarine whilst surrounded by other robotsRead More →

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This week I went to Birmingham for the Advance HE STEM conference. This is a conference for people who teach STEM subjects in the UK, and also for people who are supporters of STEM research and teaching. It’s a two day conference and I think there were probably about 200 people there (although there might have been more). I went to a bunch of talks and workshops over the two days, mostly looking at inclusion. I’ll summarise a few of my favourite workshops in this blog post. If you’re interested I have a PDF which includes more detailed (but more scrappy) notes covering all theRead More →

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I’ve just finished a MOOC (massive open online course) on play, with Futurelearn and the University of Sheffield: Exploring Play. Ideas about play have been coming up quite a bit in my work in the last few years – both in teaching (gamification, exploration) and in research (particularly in the research I’ve been doing into kids and coding). But I didn’t really know much about theoretical or practical ideas of play, particularly not outside of computing, so I signed up for a MOOC to take the broader look. I found that earlier on in this course, the readings about play types enriched my conception ofRead More →

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For the last 9 weeks I’ve been visiting the University of Girona (UdG), and working on some research in Vicorob and Udigital. I’ve taken part in three engagement activities whilst I’ve been here – even though I don’t speak the language. It turns out that with colleagues to help translate, it’s possible to be useful even without many words, although in the first two workshops I was more of an observer/helper than a facilitator. The first of these was an underwater robotics workshop, with a visiting class or around 15 teenagers; the second of these was a wheeled robotics workshop with 9 adults in aRead More →

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On Sunday we had our first Aberystwyth Robotics Club pumpkin hack. Kids, pumpkins, flashing lights and electronics together in a fun afternoon workshop. In the carving station, the kids hacked away at their pumpkins with kid-safe tools or gave their design to one of our high powered Dremel wielding helpers. With a suggested age range of 6-12 we weren’t going to let the attendees loose with super sharp knives or powertools, but they managed to design their pumpkins themselves and help to cut them out (or at least, carve them) In the coding zone, we had a bunch of laptops, a bunch of Arduino nanoRead 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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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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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 →

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Last week, I went to Romania for an EU ERASMUS+ project meeting about computing in schools. There were four of us from west Wales on the trip – Tomi Rowlands and Erin Good from Ysgol Bro Hyddgen, in Machynlleth, and Wayne Aubrey and myself from Aberystwyth University. The project has been running for a while now and this was our third physical meeting (you can find my blogs on previous meetings here: Perugia; Girona). The aim is to share best practice and materials which can help kids to learn to code in a playful way – it’s a fun project and we’re starting to makeRead More →