PyCon UK 2015

Finally it's time for Pycon! After weeks of avidly watching the website for tickets to go on sale and then weeks of waiting for September to arrive it's finally here!

Day One...
8.45am BREAKFAST!!! Bacon and egg bap thank you very much! 

9.30am and time for the opening ceremony which involved Zeth throwing fruit at teachers and Raspberry's at the Raspberry Pi team.

10.30 and it was off to my first session  led by Alan O'Donaghue. A great discussion about what Python is and how we can use it in the classroom.

11.20 Quick cuppa and then on to Minecraft in Education with my Picademy graduatee Sarah Zaman. Using Python and Minecraft Pi Sarah let us work through some fantastic resources she's developing with Geocraft - I built a rainbow bridge!

Side note: the most fantastic thing today is that Pycon have started their "adopt a developer" initiative where they've invited developers to attend the education track  and adopt us teachers while we're working through stuff. This has been amazing for me - I've learnt so much about how to make my code more concise and organised and why we do things certain ways. Big thanks to the Luke and Natasha from The Bank of America who spent most of the women hours helping me figure out some more stuff in Minecraft!!!

16.00 - TeachMeet time! Awesome news about micro:bit, coding evening updates and a whole host of other discussions!

18:00 time for free beer and canapés before the charity function at 19:30 - a chance to hang out with other education specialists, relax and kick back!
Another aside- I won in the raffle!!! I never win!

Day Two...
10.00 a slightly later start today. It's kids day so we're all mucking in to support in various workshops. Lot's on offer here - Astro Pi, Code Club, Physical Computing with Sense Hats and of course I had to help out in the Minecraft workshop! A great workshop run by Martin O'Hanlon programming his Lava Trap game on Minecraft Pi and Python. The kids were really engaged and I found I was pretty confident helping them with their code after yesterday's sessions! Whoop Whoop! 

12.30 lunch time and then back to the mornings stations for an afternoon of free for all activities. It's been great to see the things kids are coming up with independently and how well they grasp and understand the concepts and rules of the Python language. 

Onto the evening 7.30 and we're all seated for the Conference Meal- posh grub, wine and beer and great conversation.  I was a little bit anxious about this as they separate everyone on to random tables but the guys I was sat with were lovely and we had some great chats from dating sites to programming in java to how traumatic the 80's ewok film caravan of hope was!  After the meal we all hung around finishing off more fuzzy duck brewed beer and catching up with friends/Introducing new friends to the old.

I found the conference really useful, it's given me a lot more confidence in my classroom practice and I feel ready to delve into the world of Python with my learners which before the conference I was terrified of mainly because of their special needs. It's definitely going to be an annual outing for me and part of my development plan for my department and I would recommend that those of you who haven't been do the same! 

Peterborough's First Coding Evening!

July 7th 2015.... #CodingEvening

In the year since we graduated #Picademy my fellow graduate @CatLamin has been super busy. Amongst all the amazing stuff she does in our community Cat organises the Twickenham Coding Evening. Cat's initiative was to set up a relaxed, informal environment in which educators and local community members interested in programming and the new Computing curriculum could come together for a pint and some food, support, networking and resource sharing. as you can imagine the evening was a huge hit. Cat has now organised four events since January 2015 and other members of the Coding and Education communities are starting to contact her about setting up their own (follow the link above if you're interested) including me!

Peterborough's first Coding Evening took place on July 7th 2015. I reserved out an area of a local pub and we turned it into Geekdom! Our gathering included local teachers, TA's, potential school volunteers and members of the local community.

We were also extremely lucky to have the lovely @Geeky_Tim who is one of orgaisers of @CambridgeJam and also the wonderful @WhaleyGeek who co-authored Adventures in Minecraft and had spent all day with the BBC releasing the BBCMicrobit. We were also lucky enough that he brought along a flip the egg frying pan game that used the Microbit (except I kept calling it a MicroBOT because I've been studying Big Hero 6 with my English class).

Tim brought along Raspberry Pi's and HDMI-Pi's and we had people involved in Minecraft and trying to program RGB LED's through Scratch. A couple of people went away with a lent out Pi kit on the proviso that they have to come back with it and show us something cool they have managed to do. Discussion was flowing around the new curriculum and what resources people are using and having started at 4.30 those of us that were still going strong at 8pm sat down to get some food. The evening was a great success and as a result I will be running one every two months which seemed to be a regularity that everyone agreed on. So if you're in or around the Peterborough area please contact me @digitaldivageek (Twitter) or digitaldivageek@geektools.com and come along!

"Really well organised amnd resourced - I had wondered whether we might be sitting around in a circle saying "Errrr...", but it wasfar too well planned for that to happen!....Re-inspired to play with the RPi!"

June Update...

It’s been a few months since I’ve posted and things are rolling along nicely...

In School...

Since my last post I’ve passed my Google Educator exams and have delivered whole school training on Google Apps for Education, several people are picking this up and we look set to roll out across most subjects. Win!

We’ve now student tested our Raspberry Pi’s with the giant LED’s (buy from @pimoroni) and the Pi-Stops (buy here) which were really successful! We were having problems with getting our Pi’s on the school network but thank to the support of @jrobinson_uk from the Raspberry Pi Foundation we now have PiNet installed on a laptop ready to test out this week.

Some of my students caught a budgie on the playground last week and so I am now the proud owner of a very pretty little bird called Nip. We have set her up with her own Twitter (@budgiecam) and my Y10 group are being tasked with programming a Raspberry Pi with a motion detector and Pi camera board to take a picture when the motion sensor is triggered and then upload this to Twitter with a randomised comment. The Pi will then go home with me to be attached to Nip’s cage. Watch this space….

CamJam (@CambridgeJam) 06.06.2015…

As always Mike and Tim had a jam packed schedule of talks from PiWars to CannyBots and a host of show and tell stands - my favourite being the giant space invaders!!! It was great to catch up with @MissPhilbin and the gang from the Foundation and there was a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator meet up which was a great opportunity for us to catch up with our other Picademy graduates!

 Coding Evening…

The wonderful @CatLamin has started up a Coding Evening (website here https://codingevening.wordpress.com/) in her area (Putney) which is an informal meet up in a local pub for Teachers and other interested coders to talk about coding in he new curriculum and share resources and ideas. Some people bring along their projects and demo them to the group and it’s just a good all round evening for like minded people. I’m now starting a Peterborough Coding Evening event and details can be found here. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/coding-evening-peterborough-tickets-17304832219

New Website…

My latest personal project is to set up a website on which I can incorporate a place to share my resources (these are covered by Creative Commons licenses so can be adapted in school but not then shared by the user), host my blog, post helpful articles, websites and events and set up a monthly newsletter. The address for the site is www.geektools.biz and the business is called Geek Tools for Schools. Please visit and have a nosy, there is a suggestions form at the bottom of the home page for people to feedback or suggest resources they could use. You can also sign up for the blog and join the mailing list for the newsletter. The resources on the site are currently free, I will be starting to upload them over the next few weeks.

Raspberry Pi 3rd Birthday Bash!

Happy Birthday Raspberry Pi!!!!!! 

@Raspberry_Pi

I've been looking forward to this weekend for a good two months and it's finally here! Yesterday I travelled down to Cambridge for a big CamJam/Raspberry Pi birthday bash... And as expected it was an amazing day. 

The Education Team Panel

Eben Upton (Raspberry Pi Foundation foundering CEO) kicked us off with the journey so far, what he has learned travelling it and a few reminders of recent announcements (Raspberry Pi 2!!!!) following on from him were a series of talks in two lecture theatres from members of the Pi community. The Education Team from the foundation were on hand to answer questions from educators and parents alike, along with us Certified Educators doing our best to share our experiences and offer support where needed/wanted. David Honess was there sharing the amazing Astro Pi project/competition- check out the link! 

And in between talks there was the foyer of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory jam packed with awesomeness! There was the talking throne... Fill your board with the three words of who you want to be and take a seat: 

David Whale and Martin O'Hanlon were on hand to promote their new book Adventures in Minecraft Pi. Pimoroni and The PiHut were amongst the vendors there offering bargains on all sorts of cool stuff. And Pimoroni were packaging there wares in an exceptionally cool bag. 

There were bunnies pooping chocolate mini eggs, a stall with lots of cool retro games (I got very excited as they had Chuckie Egg which was my favourite on our old Amstrad 64 when I was a kid):

For those interested in robotics and Pi there was an obstacle course, and stalls featuring different ideas/designs/equipment. Check out PiWars for more super cool robotics stuff! 

And then at four thirty all those with party tickets mucked in setting up for some fun and games (literally!).

We were provided with Dominos pizza, some delicious cakes and free Raspberry Pi Beer from Fuzzy Duck Brewery - Check out there website for how they use Python programming and Raspberry Pi's to brew their ale! 

We played pass the parcel for a goody bag full of freebies - I still haven't forgiven Ben Nutall for making me give up a cool GitHub t-shirt but I did end up with a Drawdio Bausatz -the instructions are in German but look out for a short blog post once I've figured it out... 

I also managed to wangle a GitHub mug to ease the pain of losing the T-Shirt! 

Finally, it was time to chill with my Picademy friends and the guys from the education team... A nice relaxing end to an informative and inspiring day, I'm just gutted I couldn't make Sunday's second innings of all cool things Pi!! 

Who to follow:

Rapberry Pi & CamJam: @raspberry_pi @EbenUpton @CambridgeJam @recantha @Geeky_Tim @RachelRaynes @asbradbury

Raspberry Pi Education team: @MissPhilbin @ben_nutall @dave_spice @clivebeale @jrobinson_uk @martinohanlon @samaaron

Raspberry Pi Certified Educators: @digitaldivageek (me!) @CatLamin @Swaygrantham @Fabteachertips @monkeymademe (Look out for more in future posts as there are too many to list here!!) 

Other great Raspbians: @whaleygeek @ModMyPi @pi_weekly @RasPiTV @JarJarGeek @charwarz @pimoroni @mypifi @ThePiHut @TheMagP1 

Who am I? What is this blog?

First up, who am I?... I'm a thirty something Computing teacher in a special needs school. I have a
degree in Music and Philosophy and trained originally as a Music teacher... bit of a U-turn huh? Yep, definitely!!

After teaching Music for four years I realised I was losing my passion for it both inside and outside the classroom whilst those around me seemed to be getting more of an enrichment of what they did in their own time from being immersed in it all day? So I took a break, decided I would just have to lump being one of those statistics (you know, one in 4 leaving and all that). I was told in no uncertain terms by EVERY recruitment agency I went to that I had no employable skills or relevant experience for such a competitive job market. WHAAAAAAT?!!! I hear you screaming!! Yep, true that!

So I wound up spending the summer as a temping receptionist at the local probation offices... Not the busy, super organised, highly skilled reception/admin lady, just a receptionist who answers the phone and books in the offenders (through bullet proof glass - but I trained and taught in inner city London so apparently I DID have some relevant experience for this one!). Mostly, I twiddled my thumbs and thought of inventive ways to finish myself off if I didn't get some kind of mental stimulation and my brain turned to jelly leaving me a vegetable. Then the reality that £6.45 an hour wasn't going to pay my bills once my precious savings ran dry hit home. So I started doing supply work. Turns out I hate supply work and teaching a load of kids I don't know something I hadn't planned myself and it turns out a lot of teachers leave tests and exam practice as cover work so I had to sit and once again twiddle my thumbs (which by now were becoming quite muscular from all said twiddling) while they sat in silence. Then I did a days supply in a local special school and everything changed...

I wound up covering ICT for a couple of terms and then landed the job permanently. Suffice to say that coming from a music background this was an entirely different kettle of fish so I had to retrain with regards to my subject knowledge. I was pretty IT savy with regards to use of software but then it all changed in September to Computing and I'm not going to lie "programming" freaked me out (still does to some extent!), but not one to back down from a challenge and being someone who likes to learn I attended Picademy (which was amazing!) and got myself a load of books and some online courses. It's been a very big mountain and I'm still only about 2 meters up!

Jump to three years down the line and here I am, starting to slowly become more confident in my ability of teaching Computing as it's now called but still struggling with Python and screaming in my head that our school network won't allow me to download software or files onto my Pi's!!

She likes to help me with my marking! 

Outside work I'm a big fan of fantasy, horror and sci-fi books/films, I bake and (attempt to) do sugarcraft, I'm a bit of a gym junkie, a trained singer, addicted to Plants 'vs' Zombies and Clash of Clans and because I am such a geek I like to do courses on Coursera. I'm also mother to one crazy little blue furred fluff ball who's antics keep me sane and smiling through the most stressful of times (and as teachers we all know there are plenty of those!! Good job the rewards outweigh them!)

So that's me. What is this blog? Well, hopefully, it's not just an account of my experiences teaching computing inside and outside the classroom/school but also an account of my life as a bona fide geek and a place to share resources with readers and get feedback and ideas from like minded (possibly way more knowledgeable) people!