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I’ve been working on the Technocamps project for the last year, and one of the things I’ve been heavily involved with is a workshop on AI, loosely based around Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (also known as The Turing Test Paper). You can find that paper online in loads of places, e.g. http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html. In it, he considers the question “Can computers think?”. The AI workshop helps schoolkids to consider the same question. It’s the Alan Turing Centenary year which is a major motivation for taking on this topic, but I suspect I’d have put together a workshop on this anyway as it’sRead More →

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On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I was stuck in the Arts Centre with about 20 kids, some nice people called Sophie & Rain, a load of Lilypad Arduinos and a bunch of electronics components. The plan? 3 days of fun with soft circuits, for schoolkids, for Technocamps. Rain and Sophie put the program together, and it was brilliant – we went from basic circuits through programming, to serial vs parallel, to switches, right up to sensors using light dependent resistors to do things with LEDS. For the whole three days I can honestly say that all of the kids were entirely engagedRead More →

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In Technocamps we’re going to be running an easter holiday workshop on wearable computing, which will use lilypad arduinos to build cool things you can wear. We’ve got a half-tem holiday workshop going on right now (“Making Robots See”) so I’ve been tasked with going up there and doing a short talk on wearables. So I made one: It’s really basic – just four LEDs and a short program that cycles back and forth lighting them up in turn – but it was really fun to put together. It didn’t take that long either. If you know a young person (11-19) in Ceredigion who fanciesRead More →

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I’m just back from the Computing At School annual teachers’ conference, which was held in Birmingham University. It was a really fascinating conference – a mixture of policy, curriculum, practical advice, tips and tricks. The problem of computing in schools is now well known, with reports from the Royal Society, BCS, NESTA, and many other major organisations all singing the same song: we’re raising a generation of people who know how to consume computing technology, but not how to create it. CAS as a group have produced some very important contributions to this policy debate – in terms of the current state of computing education,Read More →