The adventures of teaching computing science to university students
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
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
As part of a project I was trying to import a spreadsheet of data into NVivo for Mac so that this would become the classification sheet for each instance of the data. However, it kept reporting an error about the data having different numbers of columns in the rows. Several hours of frustration later, having
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
I am presenting a talk on how to use ‘becoming comfortable with uncomfortableness’ as a growth strategy at Lean Agile Scotland 2015 in Edinburgh. Since then I have also presented this as a workshop twice, once for the BCS SPA conference in 2017, and for the University of Aberdeen’s Leadership Academy in 2018. These are the slides,
I was able to use my CoCreAct training in a workshop I facilitated yesterday for SoapBox Collective for their World Changers Innovation Challenge. The event had started on the Saturday, but my part was on the Wednesday when the students would be ideating and then prototyping their challenges. The focus on the event was to
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