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 time you get to spend with cool local people as well as the time you spend chatting to teachers and lecturers from other countries – we’ve come up with some good ideas and I think the links we have with Bro Hyddgen now are great.
In May, Girona has a flower festival which means that there are hundreds (literally, hundreds) of floral displays across the town. It also meant that the town was fairly full (hotels were busy and the streets filled up during the afternoon). But we were working pretty much non stop so that didn’t bother us too much.
The aim of the project is to write, test and revise workshop activities for schoolkids, and then to write a book explaining what we’ve done and what we’ve learned. As we’re nearing the end now, we have been mostly writing and testing activities. The group split into 3 sub-groups, to work on different aspects of our remaining tasks, and over the course of the week, we visited three schools and ran 8 workshops as well as adding something like 50 pages of text to our book. Busy busy. Here’s the group shot at a school in Figueras, where we’d just run two parallel workshops and a book editing session:
Figueras is famous for one particular guy: Salvador Dali. His museum is there and after we’d been in the school a full day (9-4) we got to visit the museum. It is definitely a museum to recommend – Dali didn’t just fill it with pictures, there are sculptures and the very building is surrealist. If you get to go try to get a tour as the tour guide was great at explaining what was actually going on behind the art. Believe me, there’s a lot going on behind the art. From 6-8 that evening we gathered in a coffee bar to have a Dali-themed Scratch Hackathon. Here’s a picture of Wayne and I working on our respective Scratch programs. I thought it was a lovely idea to get us staff engaging with Scratch and playful coding – if you spend all your time talking about how coding should be fun without actually doing any fun coding… it can get difficult to maintain the enthusiasm:)
Eduard Muntaner (EduardM on scratch and on twitter) has put together a studio of the scratch outputs we made that evening – there are some fun animations. I made a video activated Dali face where the moustache twirls when you move infront of your laptop camera: you can play it here.
We visited Escola Veinat in Salt (a suburb of Girona) the next day, and ran workshops on Mindstorms and on Scratch. The Scratch workshop had been written by the Romanian team, was being delivered by the Catalan team and my job was to observe, along with an Italian colleague. This multiple observers approach is one of the real strengths of these training meetings – we try out each others’ materials, and we critique them, and we revise them. They’re actually getting really good now. Here I am in the classroom, trying to observe rather than help. It was fairly easy not to help too much as my Catalan is not very good at all…
In the evening we had a talk from Maria Antonia Canals, who is an absolute superstar in terms of pedagogical theory in Spain. She is 84 or something like that and has had the most amazing life, working in schools and in teacher training for so long and in such a creative and thoughtful way. Her specialism is the teaching of mathematics, particularly systems which make maths tangible and she’s invented some really superb systems for explaining abstract concepts to little kids.
On the penultimate day, we went to St George’s School, which is an English language instruction school outside of Girona where we could run 4 parallel workshops. I ran the AppInventor workshop with some 13-year-olds, which after a couple of technology related hiccups went quite well. The kids were amazingly quick to pick it up so even though we’d lost a bit of time to setup, everyone managed to write a basic drawing app and get it onto their phones/tablets.
Whilst I was working on the AppInventor workshop my Aber colleague Nigel was helping out with a Scratch workshop. I think the other workshops were all scratch activities, actually – the school is a 3-18 school so we were able to run workshops, in English or in French, across all age groups.
It was then back to the University of Girona for a quick tour of their underwater robotics lab, and then another afternoon spent working on our book. The book is getting there, the robots are awesome.
