I just stumbled across this blog title in my drafts from over a year ago. ‘Don’t teach code’ Which is timely as I just arranged to start a ‘Code Club’ at one of our local Primary schools. The benefits of 7 year olds in Wales learning code are similar to those of them learning Ancient…
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I just stumbled across this blog title in my drafts from over a year ago. ‘Don’t teach code’ Which is timely as I just arranged to start a ‘Code Club’ at one of our local Primary schools. The benefits of 7 year olds in Wales learning code are similar to those of them learning Ancient…
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This year, Bulgaria holds the presidency of the European Union, I was invited to Sofia to be a panel speaker at one of the associated conferences, Educate to Create. The conference was billed as “an opportunity to bring attention to the pressing need to raise digital skills and competence levels across Europe and to support…
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A post I wrote for the Taccle3 project output on STEM attitudes and encouraging girls and young women to engage in STEM… I recently came across the article The Rise of Feminist Hacker Spaces and How to Make Your Own which describes the history and creation of Double Union hacker space in San Fransisco. A hacker […]
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Jen and I went along to the National Digital Learning Event and Awards in Cardiff earlier in June. We handed out Taccle books and went to some workshops. There were a few to choose from but I attended a technocamps session which explored some ways of teaching computer science using lego bricks, (build a simple lego structure, now explain to your partner how to build an identical structure without them seeing what you have built) using people, (direct your person around the room using simple commands) and using Cargo Bot. I like what technocamps do, kit like Lego Mindstorms is pretty expensive, so they take the kit around to secondary schools and colleges across Wales for one day workshops. For lots of ideas about how to teach computing, coding and programming for the rest of the year you could check out the Taccle2 blog and the Babitech page.
In the afternoon I had fun playing with Sonic Pi , which uses code for composing and performing music, you can see me in the video below (just after the 2 minute mark) getting flustered because there was a mistake in my loop. Don’t let that put you off, it was really good fun and a great way to get instant and useful results form your code.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRq1W7ffdDE?rel=0]
The best thing about the day was seeing the great things being done across Wales with Ponty locals Big Click scooping the Commercial Digital Project Award
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRVhWD9sjkY?rel=0]
You can see all of the other inspirational kids and teachers getting their tech on at the Hwb website with projects like e-safety, coding with minecraft, creating an interactive local map and staging a robot wars competition.
Keep an eye out for next years entries, Welsh kids are good with technology, the competition should be tough!
I did some writing for O2 Telefonica at the end of last summer, you can find the published versions and more on the O2 guru bites site but I thought the Babitech and Pontydysgu audiences would appreciate their own versions…
Learning about computing is learning to think in a logical way. You need to be able to break a problem down into smaller parts, to look for and recognise patterns, to work out what the most essential details are and come up with a step by step method for solving the problem which anyone could follow and produce the same results. All of these things can be taught without any technology at all. You could programme your kids to make the perfect cup of tea!
If you have children in years 7, 8 or 9 in England, they will be studying the…
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Filed under: Dissertation distractions 😉 
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
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We will be at Online Educa Berlin 2015. See the info above. The stream URL to play in your application is Stream URL or go to our new stream webpage here SoB Stream Page.