Some Good News!

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I haven’t been very active on my blog recently, nor on Twitter, as I have frantically been preparing for my AST assessment which was yesterday. I’m pleased to report that I passed and am  now officially an Advanced Skills Teacher.

Well that was my first piece of good news, the second is that it’s nearly that time of year again . . . . . on 24th November is the 8th Microsoft Partners in Learning Forum at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. This was a fantastic event last year and is also free! You can check out the video from last year here.

This year I am lucky enough to be delivering a workshop with the fantastic Ray Chambers from Lodge Park Technology College called “Kinect and Kodu, A Games Based Approach”. Ray will be highlighting the excellent work he has been doing with Kinect in his classroom and I will be talking about the use of Kodu to make games in different contexts.

Other workshops include:

You can read in-depth information about these workshops at the Partners in Learning Website. From reading the descriptions of each of these workshops I’m sure the Forum will prove to be yet another outstanding event, I just wish I could attend all of the workshops myself!

You can sign up to the event directly here. I look forward to meeting some of you there on 24th November!

Kodu in the Klassroom & TeachMeet

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I am going to be running my successful Kodu in the Klassroom seminar again on 13th July in Margate, Kent. This time it will be free though!

If you are unfamiliar with Kodu, you can check out my previous entry here. This seminar will give delegates a chance to learn the basic skills of using Kodu to create a simple game and will then move onto game design and problem solving in the afternoon. A Scheme of Work for teaching Kodu to Key Stage 3 will also be supplied for delegates to use in their own schools.

The day will close with a TeachMeet, giving willing delegates an opportunity to share best practice within their ICT classrooms in the form of short presentations of either 2 or 7 minutes.

For further information you can download the flyer here. Places are issued on a first come first served basis and there are a maximum of 20 places available. Booking is available online at the address below:

 

Lego Robot Wars

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I have recently been playing with Microsoft Robotics Studio using the visual programming language to program my Lego Mindstorms robots. The flexibility this offers is fantastic, not only can you use it to control a vast array of different robots but it also acts as an interface for other hardware too, including web cams and Xbox controllers. After reading a very insightful guide over on Channel 9 I managed to create a simple program to control my robot directly using my Xbox controller. The bonuses don’t end there though, if you want to try out your program without having to connect to your robot you can change to simulation mode which brings up a virtual robot and environment on screen to use for testing, this saves a lot of time when it comes to debugging!

From this I have decided to host a Robot Wars competition in school. I have moved my programming club to Thursdays after school to give us more time. The students will have the opportunity to build their robots and learn how to program and control them in real time using Xbox controllers. The technology faculty have agreed to build an arena, so I just need some keen students and some bluetooth adaptors for the netbooks! I’m very much looking forward to this project, I may even attempt to expand to a local primary school too if it all goes well!

If you, too, are interested in trying out the robotics studio, there are some great tutorials to get started available here. There are also some building guides to help the students on the following sites:

A final quick note, I’ve changed the Robot Wars rules slightly to accommodate for my Lego robots so I don’t end up with lots of broken Lego pieces! Instead, the robots will need to hold a ball and the winner will be the first team to knock the ball off of their opponents robot.

Little Ilford Deep Learning Day

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Yesterday, as part of my Microsoft Evangelist role I was invited to run workshops at Little Ilford School in London with year 10 students as part of their deep learning day, alongside Jan Webb (@janwebb21) and Ray Chambers (@lanky_boi_ray).

The school was very welcoming and I was impressed with the way the day had been organised. Students went to the various workshops in their tutor groups with just half an hour being spent on each activity. Short and snappy sessions worked well as it meant students never spent very long on one particular activity. The idea behind the day was to give students a taster of various ICT tools and software and to look at how ICT could be used in the workplace. Throughout the day they visited the following workshops on a carousel:

  • Autocollage, Plex and Stamp
  • Kodu Game Lab
  • Songsmith
  • Building PC’s
  • Think U Know – Internet Safety
  • BT Work Inspiration
  • Creating Ringtones
  • Careers in ICT
  • Film Trailers
  • Olympics – CAD design
  • Social Media
  • Gaming Corner

All workshops received very positive feedback (I almost wished I wasn’t presenting so I could take a peak at the others!). I ran the Kodu workshop which consisted of a very quick run through of making a simple game – collecting apples and being chased by an enemy, the students then logged on and spent 20 minutes trying out the tutorials and making their own games. The session was well-received by the students and I am sure many of them will be downloading Kodu at home!

As a whole I was so impressed with the day and the positive attitudes of all the students involved, I may have to suggest we do something similar in my own school, I know our students would really appreciate it too!

The New Look!

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Just a quick post, it has been my intention for some time to merge my blog and website into one entity. I have now finally done it! Now all of my resources and blog posts can be found right here in one place!