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Showing posts from April, 2012

Bringing Sense into the classroom

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 When we (a team of us at the OU who worked on the module My Digital Life ) developed the SenseBoard and adapted MIT's Scratch language as Sense to teach entry level programming, we had to develop activities that students could complete while studying at a distance and therefore not overly complicated (at least at first). In fact the approach we gave was to give students partially completed Sense programs and get them to add the missing elements. The overarching goal was to have students build interesting and above all fun projects right from the beginning. However, the programming guide that was written to introduce all of the basics (iteration, selection, variables, etc) was designed to be studied over a 1 week period and there didn't easily lend itself to delivery in a 1-day face to face workshop. It also didn't make much use of the SenseBoard as an I/O device. Therefore when were approached with the idea of running a workshop together with UCL's Schools Outreac

Return to the blog ...

It's been an age since I have had the time to blog and this site had fallen by the wayside.  However, I find myself looking for a place to gather thoughts, share ideas and activities, so restarting the blog seems like a good idea.  The name 'Academic Marginalia' is inspired by those thoughts and ideas that one jots down about in the margins when reading something really stimulating.  The idea here is to reflect on my experiences as an academic, both in terms of teaching and research but also on wider issues that affect higher education and scientific enquiry. Not sure how regularly I will get the chance to update, but will do my best to make regular (albeit sometimes brief!) postings.