Pi Talks at PyConUK
You may remember our Education team attended PyConUK in Coventry last month. We ran the Education Track, which involved giving workshops to teachers and running a Raspberry Jam day for kids at the weekend. We also gave talks on the main developer track of the conference.
Carrie Anne gave a fantastic keynote entitled Miss Adventures in Raspberry Pi wherein she spoke of her journey through teaching the new computing curriculum with Raspberry Pi, attending PyConUK the last two years, being hired by the Foundation, and everything she’s done in her role as Education Pioneer.
I also gave my talk PyPi (not that one) – Python on the Raspberry Pi showing interesting Pi projects that use Python and demonstrating what you can do with a Pi that you can’t on other computers.
Alex gave his talk Teaching children to program Python with the Pyland game – a project Alex led over the summer with a group of interns at the Computer Lab.
The conference ended with a sprint day where Alex led a team building and testing Pyland and adding challenges, and I worked with a group of developers porting Minecraft Pi to Python 3.
If you missed it last week, we posted Annabel’s Goblin Detector, a Father-daughter project the 8 year old demonstrated at PyConUK while enjoying the Raspberry Jam day.
1 comment
Stewart Watkiss
Great talks.
I was fortunate to meet the team briefly at Pycon UK, but for me the day was really about supporting my children so I didn’t get chance to talk properly. These presentations touch on the very thing I am interested to see – which is ways to get more people (professionals and hobbyists) involved in supporting teachers and teaching computing.
I met up with Clive about 18months ago and a brief chat I had with him resulted changed my life (as far as my volunteering activities at least). As a result I now run a Code Club, help with another coding club in a secondary school and I am helping to support teachers learning about the new curriculum. I am sure that there are many other people that could help if they were told about the opportunities available, which is the next thing I’m working on.
As well as getting IT professionals more engaged it’s sometimes hard to link up with the teachers that need the support. There are some opportunities already (Jams / CodeClub meetings / STEM networking), where I tend to see the same computer science teachers that are already engaged, but not those who have only ever done “powerpoint” which are the teachers that may need additional support.
I think it would be good for everyone (children, teachers, school budgets, IT companies and IT professionals) for more collaboration between schools and industry.