The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
While at #Agile2017 in Orlanda I was able to participate in ‘The Silent Experiment’ being run by Sal Freudenberg, Katherine Kirk , and Chris Corriere, as part of the Audacious Salon. I’d missed this in Edinburgh during it’s unveiling at Lean Agile Scotland, and had read about it in Sal’s ‘Inclusive Collaboration Experiments‘ book, where
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
I regularly attend a number of tech conferences each year and a smaller number of academic ones. This works well for me as I am always seeking better ways to educate my students about professional practices. Last week I was guiding visitors around the campus as part of a site visit for an academic conference,
Ellen Grove Twitter LinkedIn and I ran a 90 minute workshop based on the work of Edgar Schein and his book Humble Enquiry at the Lean Agile Scotland conference in October 2016. The goal was to highlight that people should (need to) take the time to build relationships between each other in order to have
The last session I went to at #p4a16 was ‘Culture Coding’ from Ari-Pekka Lappi was great. He explored how you can use the notion of ‘coding’ with its ‘function’ concepts to build design routines into your practices. In the same way that a kid could use Scratch with its drag-n-drop code snippets to form loops
We had hoped to be launching the CityLab course in September. We didn’t quite manage to do that in the end. This was disappointing, but useful in the end as it offered more time to pull things together for the coming term in January. It also still means that we can run a pilot in
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
In the spring Jo Holtan and I got talking about http://citystudiovancouver.com over lunch at the beach in Aberdeen. Matt Lowell had told her about this idea as part of their CycleHack adventure since he’d moved to Vancouver. We thought this would be a good thing to do for our respective institutions: University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh. Some
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
The University of Aberdeen is a charity registered in Scotland, No.SC013683