I’m pleased to announce the development of a new workshop for climate week! This project is a collaboration with Arcola Energy.
The aim of the workshop is to build a model car and compete with other groups to see who can go the furthest on 5ml of hydrogen. We’ve built a custom refuelling station and laser cut a set of parts for building the cars.
Students will use hot melt glue guns to put the pieces together.Because the workshop is designed to run in under an hour, we’ve given them a good head start by providing a motor, fuel cell, and hydrogen delivery system mounted on a chassis. Longer projects could involve the design and build of these components too.
Published by Matthew on October 19, 2010
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I’m looking for a school to be a partner in bringing my ‘near space’ project to reality!We’d need to raise about £1000 and have about 12 children between 12 and 16 to work with for 30 hours. All the details are in the near space proposal.
Our competition to build the best wind turbine blades was won by Hillyfield primary school in London. They came first out of over 600 children. The winning blades generated 118mW of power in our windtunnel.
The UK ‘SAUCE’ (Schools at University for Climate and Energy) programme is based in London Metropolitan University’s Department of Applied Social Sciences (DASS) and was designed to develop education in climate awareness, offer smart energy choices for 10 to 13 year olds, and promote the adoption of similar programmes in schools across Europe.
I’m running a wind turbine workshop where young people will get to design and test wind turbine blades in a custom built wind tunnel.
One reason why I’m excited is because we’ve been working on a fantastic wind tunnel for testing the blades. The wind tunnel is linked to a computer so we can record the best scores in terms of power generated. You can see the photos of our wind tunnel development here.
We’ll be applying learning-to-learn philosophy, and especially encouraging young people to see how much better they can make blades by trying more than one design.
Participants enjoyed themselves and gave some good feedback on what they had learnt in the session as well as ways to improve it in the future.
Some of the games invented in the session are going on to be used in the participants own work - what a great result!
And here is an interesting artifact from the event. Everyone had 9 stickers to distribute as they thought fit. The results show what people thought were important values for learning or for playing games. It suggests that challenge, fun and engagement are key areas to address when creating games for learning.
Published by Matthew on February 25, 2010
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This month at Arcola’s excellent Green Sunday event, I’ll be running the moodlamp workshop - this fits in well with this months theme: technology and design.More info about the other activities here.
Published by Matthew on December 18, 2009
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One of the problems we’ve faced in doing graffiti workshops for young people is the fumes and the mess. Now we have a great new tool to help in our workshops: the virtual graffiti machine!
Young people can practice indoors and get to grips with the general concepts and ideas of graffiti before going outside and painting.
The instructions to make your own virtual graffiti system are published and are freely available on the instructables website.
Published by Matthew on November 17, 2009
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We started our last session with a fun variation on a name game, before discussing last week’s homework question: “Where would better communications be useful in your life?” This shed some light on some communications in school that could be improved.
The main point I wanted to cover in this session was how important it is for the listener to check their understanding of a communication. This simple skill prevents many common communication issues from arising.
We played a version of the ‘broken telephone game’, where people whispered the message around the circle and we see how close they are to the original transmission at the end. We then played it again but this time the listeners related back to the whisperers what they had heard.
Next we moved on to play a variation on a game from last week, where we role-played various scenarios to practise communication. The key point was to cleanly and fully summarise your partner’s communication.
This marked the end of the workshop topics, and we spent the remaining 20 minutes doing feedback; questionnaires, the mindset dot feedback from the first workshop, and a few people recorded some video clips as well.
We’re just starting to look at the results of the feedback, but some of it is very promising. Here is a composite photo of the mindset feedback that we ran before the first workshop and after the last. It shows people’s beliefs in their ability to change various aspects about themselves. After the last workshop people showed a marked increase in their beliefs about being able to change!
Published by Matthew on November 4, 2009
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Continuing from last week’s motivation theme; we split into 2 groups and played a game of boggle. This illustrated how competition can be a form of motivation, and one that we can artificially add.
We had a QA session and drew a mindmap that collected our ideas about motivation. We considered last week’s question about building motivation in areas where we are not naturally attracted to. This grew into a discussion about being motivated in school, the use of praise and rewards.
We then moved on to the communication part of the workshop. We started by playing a game where blindfolded people were led to a part of the room and had to be guided back to a chair by their sighted partners. The aim of the game was to get people into the space of really listening and being guided to a destination. In communication we can often assume we know what the other person means, and we may miss their real message.
We had a QA session on ‘what is good communication like’ and had some interesting answers, including some great metaphors like airport control towers and airline pilots. I introduced the idea of the listener summarising the communication back to the talker to check that the communication was on target.
To practice this, we split into 3s and each 3 rotated around the roles of coach, talker and listener. It was the listener’s job to clearly summarise what the talker’s issue was.
The homework question this week was “Where would better communications be useful in your life?”
Published by Matthew on October 22, 2009
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In this workshop we started off by looking at how beliefs about ourselves (mindset), are formed - especially through the way we communicate.
The group got into groups of 3; a coach, a listener and a talker. The talker told the listener about a challenge they were facing, and the talker tried out different forms of encouragement. The aim was to experience what it is like to give and recieve communication that puts us into the growth mindset (I can do this), as apposed to a fixed mindset (this is too difficult, I’ll give up).
This exercise was inspired by an experiment performed by Carol Dweck, that showed the way we communicate has an important effect on how we perform and behave subsequently.
We then moved on the the second part of the workshop - creativity. We started by solving the problem: how can you build a free standing tower of a certain height that is stable enough to be moved? I supplied each team with a can, 2 peices of cardboard, some string and a length of sticky tape. In fact, no group met the challenge completely, but the exercise showed that there are many ways of solving a problem.
This illustrates one of Roger von Oech’s ideas about creativity - always look for the 2nd right answer. Each team tried to solve the problem in a different way. It’s only by coming up with lots of ideas that we can choose the best. I also raised the point that schools often encourage people to think that there is only 1 right answer; tests, questions etc.
We had a group discussion about creativity and how it is useful. I documented our discussion as a mindmap:
I presented another idea from Roger’s book: a whack on the side of the head; the usefulness of ambiguity. We split into groups and each group came up with an problem that we could solve with some creative ideas. Each group chose a random word and had to use this as a ‘jumping off’ point to solve their challenges.
Finally I asked people to consider the question: “where could you use more creativity in your life right now” as homework for the next session.
