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Electromagnetic Field is a massively friendly not-for-profit hacker and maker camp which happens every two years. I went in 2012 and spoke about women in tech, and I went again in 2016 and spoke about doing robotics with kids. This year I’ve been trying to do a bit less work and get a bit less stressed, so I decided not to submit a talk or workshop. Then my mate Ben put out a call for installations for a cyberpunk zone and I ended up pitching an idea for a display to sit behind the bar. This installation took – as you might imagine – longerRead More →

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At EMFCamp in 2016 there was a musical ballpit, and ever since having a go in it (which was my first ever ballpit experience) I have wanted to build one. This has become something of an ongoing project. First, I contacted some soft-play suppliers to find out about the cost of balls, and it turns out that soft-play balls (proper ones for use in commercial soft-play facilities) cost quite a lot. 15p+VAT each. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but to fill a large paddling pool that was going to be something like £2,000, and even if I tried to bodge it with a smallerRead More →

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I decided to build a retro games controller based on something I saw on the internet. There are lots of discussions and videos and howtos, but to be honest I’ve never been particularly good at following instructions so I just bought a kit from arcade world (the two-player xin-mo board one – here’s a link) and had a go at bodging it together. It came with some instructions. Here’s a picture of the instructions, along with a pound coin for scale. I did read these instructions. Then I googled, to find slightly more detailed instructions. Then I went “fuck it” and just got on withRead 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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I’m visiting Girona Uni at the moment as part of my sabbatical term, and whilst I’m here I’m trying to expand my horizons a bit academically. SO, this week I attended a workshop on marine robotics, which just happened to be going on whilst I’m here and they let me attend for free. The workshop is for marine robotics, but it is not just a research conference. Attendees come from 30 research centres, and 12 companies. Presentations come from 14 EU projects, 4 national projects, 4 companies. On day one, I saw 16 of the talks and then skipped the rest (including the demo andRead More →

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BCSWomen Chair Sarah Burnett has had a fab idea, which is to hold a series of webinars that talk about AI and how it is changing the world. In BCSWomen we do a lot of stuff about the women, and a lot of stuff to support women, but we also do a lot of stuff that is useful for tech people in general. The AI Accelerator falls into this category; the idea is that tech is changing and AI is driving that change, so we’re going to try and provide a background and overview of AI to help people get to grips with this. OnceRead 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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Last week I was invited to present at the first Human Centred Cognition summer school, near Bremen in Germany. Summer schools are a key part of the postgraduate training experience, and involve gathering together experts to deliver graduate level training (lectures, tutorials and workshops) on a particular theme. I’ve been to summer schools before as a participant, but never as faculty. We’re at a crossroads in AI at the moment: there’s been a conflict between “good old fashioned AI” (based upon logic and the symbol manipulation paradigm) and non-symbolic or sub-symbolic AI (neural networks, probabilistic models, emergent systems) for as long as I have known,Read 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 →