It was nano presentations all the way at the TeachMeet proposed by Drew Buddie for the 2018 Scratch conference at the Media Lab in MIT, Cambridge, USA. We got an end-of-the-day time slot, and a cool dark space (with super duper AV facilities) called The Cube.

As we’d all had a long long day attending, presenting, and workshopping at the main conference, all presentations were ‘nano’ in nature – short, sweet and kept to the point. Presenters from all over the world volunteered to share out their wisdom – USA (Mildred, Kathleen, Shawn), Africa (Max – Kenya, Rehema – Tanzania, Justin – South Africa, John – Nigeria), Europe (England – Andy & Richard, Ireland – Mags, Scotland – Drew & Rob, Austria – Matt, Netherlands – Hans), South America (Brazil – Ana). There was a ‘use tech well for the good of all’ thread running thru the evenings presentations.

Drew was MC; Russel Tarr’s trusty classtools.net Wheel Of Fortune determined the order in which our thirteen speakers took the stage; me and The Dromedary of Doom were (almost totally redundant) timekeepers; Richard and John were on-call  ‘technoroadies’.

classtools.net random name picker

There was a whole new zero hour aspect to this TeachMeet, which was a delightful as it was surprising. Although some speakers had signed up in advance in answer to an online invite, others signed up from the floor as the TeachMeet was in progress – by email or by sharing me a link to their presentation. Lightning speed internet reliability – connectivity ftw!

The regrettably missing portion in this TeachMeet was some built in conversation time, but the clock and our collective tiredness worked against us in this instance. However, judging by the responsive atmosphere as the presentations rolled along, I think it is fair to say the occasion wasn’t diminished in any great way by this omission.

Thanks Drew for prompting this, the third of hopefully many consecutive TeachMeets at Scratch.

MC Drew

Round Tables at the Cube

Rehemma from Tanzania represents She Codes For Change

See Twitter timeline for this TeachMeet at #tmScratchMIT

The Friday late afternoon Ignite Session at the 2018 Scratch Conference at MIT was a happy, lively, and informative affair. The audience, which of course contains all the Ignite presenters as well as curious others, was receptive and responsive. Lisa, our curator of this session, had the perfect light-but-ruthless (think USA version of Irish Mammy – Irish Mom perhaps?) touch that kept things ticking along, and the format of a series of short sharp 5 minute presentations followed by Q&A made for an engaging and learnful hour for everyone present.

CTwins Ignite Scratch Conference MIT 2018

Richard Millwood and I, on behalf of our colleagues Pamela Cowan, Elizabeth Oldham, Nina Bresnihan, Glenn Strong, and Lisa Hegarty, presented the work of the CTwins project, a year long Google funded computational thinking (CT) collaboration between Irish teachers working on Scratch in cross border pairs (‘Twins’). Our project aimed to increase teacher confidence through blended paired programming practice, leveraging the remix facility in Scratch to build in cooperative learning principles. It isn’t easy to fit a year’s work into a 5 minute space, so we just sped thru the headlines, doing out best to make the central threads clear.

Ignite is a rollercoaster format like Pecha Kucha, with 20 slides each auto advancing after 15 seconds – hence our use of PowerPoint (does anyone know how to autoadvance in Google slides?) for the slide deck, which is here. The questions from the audience were insightful – the time was too short for in-depth discussion so we pointed folk to the CTwins work-in-progress webspace here.

Thanks for John Hegarty and Claude Terosier for catching and sharing some of the lighter moments:

Many thanks to all who made this the happiest conference hour of #ScratchMIT2018 – those who attended, Lisa our convenor, and co-presenters Chris, Claude, Ingrid, Janet, Natalie, Leanna, Bernat, Jens, John, Rina, Angela, Lucia, and Richard.