The first teachmeet in the capital of Norway took place early in January, in the University of Oslo. Forty teachers and some representatives from ed-tech related businesses and startups attended, many more watched the live stream. This is part of a strategy to bring teachers and developers together in an ed-tech cluster, and a decent way to kick off a new year.
A teachmeet is a good way to meet other teachers, share practices and get updates on educational technologies. There is an abundance of excellent ideas and relevant technology out there, but content in school does not change by itself. Enthusiasts and professionals need support and motivation to keep up their good work. Distances in Norway can be difficult to overcome. The distance from Oslo to the Russian border equals a trip from London to Istanbul, and since there are far less people living there – they seldom meet.

The teachmeet in Oslo was organised by Digitalpedagogene, the Norwegian answer to CAS and similar organisations and companies who train teachers in technology and pedagogics. There are two different types of teacher educations in Norway, the Universities and the “lærerskole”, academies who are less oriented towards research. Both Universities and Academies are having a hard time keeping up with the development, and this is one of the reasons why private companies like Digitalpedagogene are in demand.

Building an arena for ICT in schools is important to the Oslo region. Every year, swarms of Norwegians seek out the BETT show in London – to get new impulses from abroad, but first of all to meet other Norwegians who are interested in school and technology. Some are there to sell, some are fierce network builders, and some are just there to hang out, but in the end, they are all part of a movement who agree about one thing: there is an urgent need for change in education, and ICT is bound to play an important role. The emerging coding movement, “Lær kidsa koding”, has also had an important impact.

First, there was an interesting introduction from a local celebrity. Professor Sten Ludvigsen, head of the advisory commission working on “framtidens skole”, the future of Norwegian schools, presented his views on what direction he would recommend to the politicians. A short resume: Cross- curriculum and problem based learning, self-regulation and collaboration – everything normally associated with the 21st century skills movement – is the recipe to success and innovation. It remains to be seen if politicians will choose to listen to Ludvigsen, one can only hope.
Norwegian schools have a tradition for being progressive and student centred, but the last ten years have been different. Old fashioned governance of schools and increased focus on teach-to-test has cemented the contents in schools, forcing teachers to take responsibility for school development themselves. The national authorities have also delegated responsibility for schools to a communal level, which has led to bad investments, confusion and increasing differences. As a result of this system failure, teachers went through a bitter strike last year, and the wounds between school leadership and teachers still need some mending.

A teachmeet must be both informal, informative and entertaining, but nobody expects anyone to have the qualities of a stand-up comedian and a professor in education sciences at the same time. Still, those attending, got excellent presentations on gaming, Arduino and robotics, the use of iPad in music lessons, Minecraft in kindergartens and how to use fan-art as a learning method. There was enough content for several teachmeets, and there is hopefully still more to come.

This was the first teachmeet in Oslo, and there will be many more. Once the word spreads, and more teachers loosen up to the concept, there might be hope that a new tradition has been born.

On 18th October Staplehurst School celebrated Code Week UK in style with our 2nd U Can Too – Mozilla Maker Party.  We saw visitors not only from our own school, but many schools from the local area, as well as schools from as far afield as Snodland, Romford in Essex, and Surrey. We even had two lovely visitors from Korea, who were performing government research on the UK Computing Curriculum.

U Can Too was so busy that we couldn’t register everyone who walked through our doors, but we do know that we had more than 350 who came along and gave coding a go at our event.  We were exceptionally lucky to be invited to apply for a grant from Google, even luckier to win that grant!  Our 1st U Can Too event saw just under 100 people attend, so we increased our publicity campaign and added many new activities; both enabled by the funding from Google.  With such an increase in numbers attending we were pleased that we made the right decisions and thoroughly excited to see families working together to create so many different coding based projects and having so much fun.

Our activities were very varied, including unplugged coding activities, like our giant version of Robot Turtles as well as the more obvious choices, such as Scratch.  We also had activities that we made ourselves with some good old-fashioned wood, these were very popular, especially our ‘Crack the Code’ game and our ‘Sphero Maze Challenge’ both of which our Code Club got the chance to get in on the coding.

Here are some of the other activities that our visitors spent their 2 hours doing: Giant Voice Controlled Human Crane, Life-Size Robot Turtles board game, Mozilla X-Ray Goggles, Sphero Maze Challenge, Sphero Arena, FUZE Raspberry Pi’s, Code Club Scratch Creation – Crack the Code, Scratch programming, Scratch Jr, Looming with algorithms, Zu3D Animations, Soldering, Minecraft, Lilypad eSewing, Electric Paint.  We also had a shop and an eSafety area.

There is more info on our event blog, please find the link below:
http://www.staplehurstschool.co.uk/school-events.php

As well as our U Can Too event we got up to many other activities during Code Week UK.  We delivered training to parents sharing with them several of the programming tools that are available to their children at home, we took our Digital Leaders along to present an ‘unplugged’ coding workshop at Code Week UK’s London event, which was an amazing experience for us all and our Key Stage 2 children presented an eSafety Expo, including acting, singing and debates on a variety of eSafety topics.  As well as all this our Code Club and Digital Leaders had some extra special sessions during Code Week UK.  Code Club were visited by Vicki from FUZE who delivered a fantastic workshop using FUZE Basic to Code Raspberry Pi’s and controlled a robotic arm using the Raspberry Pi.  Whilst our Digital Leaders were visited by Lego Education for a Lego WeDo workshop challenge, our DLs worked in pairs to see who could make their Lego WeDo Motorized Spinning Tops spin for the longest… it was a tie, Samantha and Eleanor v Sam and James.  It was impossible to tell which finished first when both spinning tops stopped in unision!

As you can tell, we had a very busy week exploring the world of coding, and most importantly we loved every minute of it!

Our U Can Too event, was the biggest part of our Code Week UK endeavours.  We are very proud of the success of our event (and the week in general) and attribute much of it’s success to the funding provided by Google.  With this in mind we would like to say a huge thank you for your invitation to apply for it and also your support for our involvement in Code Week UK.  I am still working on creating a video of the DLs review, I should have it done for you by the end of the week.  In the meantime, here is a short review from one of our DLs about our presentation at your London event:

James says:

“CODE WEEK UK on 15th October
This activity was very fun. I particularly enjoyed talking to Ross and Mathew who were computer scientists, as well as teaching grownups our unplugged activity. Ross & Matthew taught me that there are different ways of sorting which are quite exiting. If I was offered the opportunity, I would definitely do this activity again. It was very informative. Personally I think it would be a school trip that all of Year 6 would enjoy, but it would be too crowded. If next year’s Digital Leaders are given the opportunity to represent us again, I would say, go ahead, it’s a great experience!”

You Can download the starter kit from:

http://codeweek.it/cody-roby-en/diy-starter-kit/

More than 90 millions people have tried an Hour of Code so far thanks to the playful massive open online course made available worldwide by Code.org. The Hour of Code is the most famous of the many cloud-based visual programming methods that have provided effective support to computer literacy campaigns targeting not only IT-gifted pupils, but neophytes of any age, regardless of their aptitudes and dreams.
Unplugged activities can further contribute to the diffusion of computational thinking, spatial reasoning and problem solving skills, lowering the access barriers in terms of age, infrastructures, and socio-economic conditions. This paper presents a method for organizing unplugged activities that retain the immediacy and effectiveness of the Hour of Code.

The method is called CodyRoby to emphasize that computer programming entails two roles: the role of Cody, a coder who provides instructions, and the role of Roby, a robot who executes them. At the beginning there are only three instructions: move forward, turn left, and turn right. Each instruction is represented by an arrow drawn on a playing card. While playing, Cody selects the cards to be passed to Roby, who moves on a chessboard accordingly. No equipment is required. Cody and Roby are just characters played by the players of the game. Having not only to write a code segment, but also to interpret and execute it, adds to the learning experience provided by CodyRoby with respect to its online counterpart.

The Cody cards
Cody cards are used to represent instructions as the blocks of visual programming tools. In order to make the game as intuitive as possible, instructions are represented using only symbols, with no words. The three basic Cody cards are shown in the Figure. They represent spatial instructions Turn Left (turn to your left without moving), Move Forward (make a step ahead), and Turn Right (turn to your right without moving).

Each card has the size typical of a playing card (about 1.97 x 2.76in) in order to be easily handled and packed in a deck. The instruction associated with the card is represented by the big arrow in the middle, while the two drawings in the upper part explain the effect of the instruction, showing the position of Roby on the chessboard before (to the left) and after (to the right) execution. The borders of the cards are shaped to suggest that they can be concatenated either vertically (top-down) or horizontally (from left to right) like pieces of a puzzle.

The DIY Starter Kit
The starter kit is freely available online (http://codeweek.it/cody-roby-en/diy-starter-kit/). It consists of 6 A4 pages to be printed out, cut out and folded in order to obtain a deck of 40 Cody cards, a card box, a folding chessboard that fits into the card box, and the Roby pieces to be placed on the board. A silent video tutorial is available that shows how to cut out and fold the kit (http://youtu.be/D5hQ9UTDQ6s).
Instead of using the kit, teachers could engage pupils in DIY activities aimed at the design of more creative Cody cards and pieces.

The Unplugged Games

There are many unplugged games that can be played with CodyRoby. Some of them are described on the CodyRoby website, many mores will be posted soon. Hereafter I outline only two of them, that are particularly suited to experience the unplugged Hour of Code: The race and The tourist.

The race
The Race is a board game for two players (or two teams) of any age. The players draw a random path across the chessboard by marking with a pencil all the squares along the path. The suggested path length is of 8 squares, that can be marked by the two players in turn (e.g., two at the time). Cells must be contiguous, i.e., any new cell must share an edge with the previous one.

The Roby pieces are placed at the beginning of the path and all the cody cards are placed at a side of the chessboard, separated by type into three decks to be easily found and picked up. When everything is ready, the players clap their hands and the game begins.

Each player (or team) has to take the cards from the side decks and to place them in sequence in from of her/him as fast as possible in such a way that the sequence of cards can drive Roby along the path. The player who finishes first presses the GO! button and tests her/his solution. This is done by moving the Roby piece along the path according to the instructions provided by the cards. The other player follows the test and tries to find an error or to think at a smarter solution (i.e., a solution which makes use of fewer cards). If the solution is correct and no shorter sequences are proposed by the other player, the fastest player wins.

The tourist
The Tourist is a spatial game for kids to be played by two teams. The game play is similar to The Race, with three main differences: i) it is played on the floor, ii) Roby pieces are replaced by a girl or boy playing the role of the tourist (an impartial referee possibly not belonging to the two teams), and iii) the path leads to the image (picture of drawing) of a monument.

Being a real-world spatial game, the path has to be drawn on the floor. The ideal material to be used to this purpose are puzzle play mats, but simple sheets of paper can also be used to compose the path.

As in The Race, the two teams start by composing a random path. This is done in turn by placing puzzle tiles (or sheets of paper) on the floor. Then a drawing representing a local monument (possibly drawn by the pupils) is placed at the end of the path, while the Tourist takes place at the beginning. Cody cards are divided by type into three decks placed on a school desk. The two teams work on two desks placed at the same distance from the main desk.
The game starts when the Tourist asks directions to the monument. The two teams have to run to get the cards they need and to put them in sequence to compose the directions. Then the cards are stacked up in a deck with the first instruction on the top. The team who finishes first provides the instruction stack to the Tourist who tests the solution following the instructions under the supervision of the other team. The fastest team wins if the solution is correct and no shorter solution is provided by the other team.
The Unplugged Hour for Code
The Hour of Code (http://hourofcode.com/) challenges online users to provide spatial instructions to a videogame character to help him/her find the correct path throughout a maze. There are 20 mazes of incremental difficulty. The first 5 mazes make use only of the three basic instructions, while the following ones introduce loops and conditional branches.

The unplugged hour of code consists of playing CodyRoby games using as paths the mazes proposed by Code.org. In particular, the first 5 mazes of the hour of code can be directly played with the starter kit on a 5×5 chessboard, as shown in the Figure. These 5 paths can be proposed as a warm-up activity before allowing pupils to design their own paths.

Cody cards representing Loops and Conditions will be released in February 2015.