The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
Taking part in the Silence Experiment at Agile 2017 made me more determined than before that running this type of session with students would be a good idea. Being offered the chance to start teaching our Human Computer Interaction course at the University of Aberdeen created an opportunity for me to ‘run the experiment’ and
I delivered a workshop on ‘Games 4 Learning‘ at the UK Horizons STEM conference in June 2017. This went well, and much talking and actions ensued from the participants about how they might use games in their teaching. At the end a question of resources came up, and I realised that I didn’t have a
All in the family Play4Agile (p4a) 2016 is over for another year. As always it’s part reunion with dear friends, and part excitement at meeting new people at this ‘unconference’, where you learn to expect to be surprised by what you find happening. I mentioned this as part of my brief lightning talk on the
I’ve been using variations of a StrategicPlay taster session using Lego Serious Play for a while. Last year I devised an open ideation game,which became our CodeTheCity Ideation Toolkit. Last Friday (6 November 2015) as part of the Open Data Scotland event we ran the ideation session in the morning and a StrategicPlay session near the
Since leaving Hamburg the last time in 2012 after my StrategicPlay training as a Lego Serious Play facilitator I have been meeting Katrin Elster each year at Play4Agile and always been impressed by her sessions, and the ideas we’ve talked about at meals and in the bar. For a while she’s talked about a ‘new’ training workshop, and I’ve
In February I returned to Play4Agile 2015 in Germany. As always this was an excellent event where I could gain new ideas, discuss old ones and try out some new ideas of my own too. It was also special this time as I took someone with from Aberdeen. This made attendance different in a good
In March 2014 I ran a workshop on developing student-run software houses for the HEA at London Metropolitan University in London. The day was broken into two halves with the morning devoted to short case studies with plenty of time for questions, and an afternoon of hands-on workshop starting with Strategic Play session using Lego
There are a number of books and online resources available explaining the background, and philosophy of Lego Serious Play. These break down into a few categories: the history, the theory and the manuals. I’ve not found any manuals, however, which explain everything. This means that in order to move beyond the basic approaches outlined in
Another year and another wonderful Play4Agile conference has happened. For me this was again an improvement on the last year. This is as much to do with the learning I’ve gone through since last year as it is about the mix of people, who were there. I just finished submitting my assignments for ILM Coaching Level 3
People attending this years’ Play4Agile 2014 were asked to blog their answer to these simple questions: Who or what brought you to Play4Agile in the first place? I saw Olaf post a tweet about the first one in 2011 and started following Katrin then too, but couldn’t make it. I was able to meet both of them
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