events (16 out of 63)
- Andrew (age 10) showed his webcam/gesture-controlled Scratch bubble-bursting game.
- Albie (age 9) demoed iPad app Wormy Drawing (which is in the app store with over 1k downloads!)
- Harry and Kiran (age 10) showed their fish-eating, physics-heavy Scratch game.
- Marley (age 13) brought his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm, that moves around and picks things up in response to commandline short codes, or a Wii remote.
- Sean and Toby (age 12) showed their Arduino model bus, which uses an ultrasound sensor to prevent accidents involving low bridges.
- Adam (age 8) showed his Scratch pong game.
- Andrew (age 10) showed his webcam/gesture-controlled Scratch bubble-bursting game.
- Albie (age 9) demoed iPad app Wormy Drawing (which is in the app store with over 1k downloads!)
- Harry and Kiran (age 10) showed their fish-eating, physics-heavy Scratch game.
- Marley (age 13) brought his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm, that moves around and picks things up in response to commandline short codes, or a Wii remote.
- Sean and Toby (age 12) showed their Arduino model bus, which uses an ultrasound sensor to prevent accidents involving low bridges.
- Adam (age 8) showed his Scratch pong game.
- Marley worked on his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm. I think he also did some general C++ and Python hacking.
- Jonas, [Joe]((http://pages.prewired.org/joe) and Cerys launched their first ever websites (and learned how to use FTP in the process)!
- Toby and Sean built an model bus using Arduino and an ultrasound sensor, aimed at prevent low-bridge related accidents.
- Mark worked on his Android game in Unity. He also modded Prison Architect and put together a spreadsheet to manage people's Minecraft mods on his server.
- Malcolm worked on setting up and tinkering with his own Minecraft server.
- Dan, Robert and Bob worked together to create a suite of tools for teaching people HTML/CSS and Java, across a website and an Android app.
- Harry started learning Java with tutorials, and worked on improving one of his Scratch games.
- Connor and Oli played with the Twitter streaming API.
- Albie ported his iPad drawing app to Scratch, and made some Scratch animations.
- Marley worked on his Raspberry Pi and Arduino based robotic arm. I think he also did some general C++ and Python hacking.
- Jonas, [Joe]((http://pages.prewired.org/joe) and Cerys launched their first ever websites (and learned how to use FTP in the process)!
- Toby and Sean built an model bus using Arduino and an ultrasound sensor, aimed at prevent low-bridge related accidents.
- Mark worked on his Android game in Unity. He also modded Prison Architect and put together a spreadsheet to manage people's Minecraft mods on his server.
- Malcolm worked on setting up and tinkering with his own Minecraft server.
- Dan, Robert and Bob worked together to create a suite of tools for teaching people HTML/CSS and Java, across a website and an Android app.
- Harry started learning Java with tutorials, and worked on improving one of his Scratch games.
- Connor and Oli played with the Twitter streaming API.
- Albie ported his iPad drawing app to Scratch, and made some Scratch animations.
- students can sign up and see the challenges and schedule
- mentors can find out how to help out (and get free lunch)
- sponsors can find out how to help us feed the students and mentors
- students can sign up and see the challenges and schedule
- mentors can find out how to help out (and get free lunch)
- sponsors can find out how to help us feed the students and mentors
- Coming soon...
Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire
☑ Attending!
Had an amazing time supporting the Prewired table at the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire on Sunday. I printed a load of flyers and posters, and helped haul laptops and lego, but then the kids did all the work. I was so impressed with how they pitched and demo'd their projects, told parents and kids all about Prewired, and generally enthused. I felt pretty safe sitting back and knowing they had things covered.
(ages approximate, I'm pretty bad at figuring them out..)
TODO: photos! (but also see @Prewired).
Also massive thanks to Eder, Cameron and Harry who stuck it out all day and helped with carrying, setting up and demo-ing hardware, and Martha and Rikki who came for the last few hours (after most of the kids had left) and helped with take-down. These people are awesome.
RSVP
Edinburgh Mini Maker FaireHad an amazing time supporting the Prewired table at the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire on Sunday. I printed a load of flyers and posters, and helped haul laptops and lego, but then the kids did all the work. I was so impressed with how they pitched and demo'd their projects, told parents and kids all about Prewired, and generally enthused. I felt pretty safe sitting back and knowing they had things covered.
(ages approximate, I'm pretty bad at figuring them out..)
TODO: photos! (but also see @Prewired).
Also massive thanks to Eder, Cameron and Harry who stuck it out all day and helped with carrying, setting up and demo-ing hardware, and Martha and Rikki who came for the last few hours (after most of the kids had left) and helped with take-down. These people are awesome.
Prewired Maker Week
☑ Attending!
During the second week of the easter holidays, we hold Prewired every day! Also known as the Maker Week, from 12 til 4 dedicated mentors hang out in CodeBase and help the kids with projects. Some kids come for just a few days, and some for the whole week. They can work on whatever they like; some carry on with what they do at regular Prewired sessions, some start a new project that they aim to finish that week, and others choose to learn something totally new.
On the first day we had over 20 kids; on subsequent days it dropped down to 10-15 because lots of schools were starting back this week.
Here's a rundown:
Mega props to mentors for helping out over the course of the week: Nantas, Freda, Eder, Luke, Helen, Cameron and Rikki (who came on his birthday!).
RSVP
Prewired Maker WeekDuring the second week of the easter holidays, we hold Prewired every day! Also known as the Maker Week, from 12 til 4 dedicated mentors hang out in CodeBase and help the kids with projects. Some kids come for just a few days, and some for the whole week. They can work on whatever they like; some carry on with what they do at regular Prewired sessions, some start a new project that they aim to finish that week, and others choose to learn something totally new.
On the first day we had over 20 kids; on subsequent days it dropped down to 10-15 because lots of schools were starting back this week.
Here's a rundown:
Mega props to mentors for helping out over the course of the week: Nantas, Freda, Eder, Luke, Helen, Cameron and Rikki (who came on his birthday!).
Smart Data Hack
☑ Attending!
I'm again helping to organise the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack, which is happening next week, 16th - 20th February. It's an event for undergraduates during the university's Innovative Learning Week, during which they get to learn loads of stuff they wouldn't normally see in class, hack around with datasets from various sponsors and supporters, eat tons of free food and hopefully win prizes.
If you're interested in getting involved, check out the Smart Data Hack website...
RSVP
Smart Data HackI'm again helping to organise the University of Edinburgh Smart Data Hack, which is happening next week, 16th - 20th February. It's an event for undergraduates during the university's Innovative Learning Week, during which they get to learn loads of stuff they wouldn't normally see in class, hack around with datasets from various sponsors and supporters, eat tons of free food and hopefully win prizes.
If you're interested in getting involved, check out the Smart Data Hack website...
Indiewebcamp Edinburgh
☑ Attending!
Along with James and Harry, I'm organising an indiewebcamp here in Edinburgh! Indiewebcamp is a 2-day unconference-style event, with lots of hacking, and support to help you take ownership of your social data and launch your own website which can interoperate with other people's, as well as with social silos like twitter.
Planning is in early stages, but we've settled on 25/26th July and Skyscanner have offered us their office as a venue, but this is to be confirmed.
We're (naturally) looking for sponsorship for lunches: if you're part of a tech company who would like to help out, we'd love to hear from you! You can find out more about sponsoring IWC events here.
Keep an eye on the event wiki page) for more details; you can register your interest or contribute to planning and brainstorming there too.
RSVP
Indiewebcamp EdinburghAlong with James and Harry, I'm organising an indiewebcamp here in Edinburgh! Indiewebcamp is a 2-day unconference-style event, with lots of hacking, and support to help you take ownership of your social data and launch your own website which can interoperate with other people's, as well as with social silos like twitter.
Planning is in early stages, but we've settled on 25/26th July and Skyscanner have offered us their office as a venue, but this is to be confirmed.
We're (naturally) looking for sponsorship for lunches: if you're part of a tech company who would like to help out, we'd love to hear from you! You can find out more about sponsoring IWC events here.
Keep an eye on the event wiki page) for more details; you can register your interest or contribute to planning and brainstorming there too.
Lovelace Colloquium Edinburgh
☑ Attending!
I'm helping to organise the Lovelace Colloquium in Edinburgh this year! Lovelace is a one-day conference for female undergraduates studying technical subjects in the UK. There are talks, a poster competition, panel and social events. I've previously talked about Lovelace here.
If you qualify, you should enter the poster competition. If you're a postgraduate or male in Edinburgh and want to help out instead, drop me an email!
RSVP
Lovelace Colloquium EdinburghI'm helping to organise the Lovelace Colloquium in Edinburgh this year! Lovelace is a one-day conference for female undergraduates studying technical subjects in the UK. There are talks, a poster competition, panel and social events. I've previously talked about Lovelace here.
If you qualify, you should enter the poster competition. If you're a postgraduate or male in Edinburgh and want to help out instead, drop me an email!
LibrePlanet
☑ Attending!
Straight after the Social Web Working Group face-to-face and indiewebcamp Cambridge is http://libreplanet.org (21st and 22nd February). It's going to be a busy week.
RSVP
LibrePlanetStraight after the Social Web Working Group face-to-face and indiewebcamp Cambridge is http://libreplanet.org (21st and 22nd February). It's going to be a busy week.
Indiewebcamp
☑ Attending!
Straight after the Social Web Working Group face-to-face is an indiewebcamp at MIT! 19th and 20th of March. Can't wait. Despite my best efforts in the past, this will be my first one.
This happened!
RSVP
IndiewebcampStraight after the Social Web Working Group face-to-face is an indiewebcamp at MIT! 19th and 20th of March. Can't wait. Despite my best efforts in the past, this will be my first one.
This happened!
Social Web F2F
☑ Attending!
I'm looking forward to attending the next face-to-face for the W3C Social Web Working Group in Boston, MA, on the 17th and 18th of March.
RSVP
Social Web F2FI'm looking forward to attending the next face-to-face for the W3C Social Web Working Group in Boston, MA, on the 17th and 18th of March.
Indieweb at TMU
☑ Attending!
I'm going to welcome TechMeetup Edinburgh attendees to the Indieweb today, which takes place at 1830 in the Skyscanner offices.
I'll post notes and links here later.
asdf
RSVP
Indieweb at TMUI'm going to welcome TechMeetup Edinburgh attendees to the Indieweb today, which takes place at 1830 in the Skyscanner offices.
I'll post notes and links here later.
asdf
ISWC Context, Interpretation and Meaning Workshop
My paper Roles and Relationships as Context-Aware Properties on the Semantic Web was accepted to the ISWC Context, Interpretation and Meaning workshop. I'll be presenting it on the 17th of October, in Riva del Garda, Italy.
OKFN Glasgow #2
I ventured to Glasgow for the second Open Knowledge Foundation meetup on Monday 18th. It was well attended, and there were six short talks:
Lorna Campbell from Cetis talked about Open Scotland. I understood this to be a collaboration between Cetis, the SQA, JISC and the ALT Scotland, to do with the opening up of education, and influencing policy and practicein this area. Here's a blog.
Grianne Hamilton from JISC talked about Mozilla's Open Badges. You can use them to reward learning, skills and achievements in all sorts of areas, and any organisaiton can create and issue badge packs to people who have earned them. Recievers can then show them off anywhere they can put HTML.
Graeme Arnott talked about a collaboration between Glasgow Womens' Library and Wikimedia, which resulted in the Scottish Women on Wikipedia event. This was a group of Scottish women getting together to edit Wikipedia articles about Scottish Women, and there was very positive feedback. They have more events planned. Graeme also reminded us about Wikimania, which is taking place next August in London.
Jennifer Jones told us about the Digital Common Wealth project. She pointed out that with media-saturated global events like the Olympics, the official story is already decided before the event even starts. An alternative to relying on what is broadcast by the mainstream media is to turn the camera on the crowd, and get the 'real' version of what is going on. The Digital Common Wealth project will encourage citizen journalists to work together to craft the story of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games from their perspective. Jennifer also raised the point that although free tools like YouTube, AudioBoo and Twitter are great for spreading stories, the data is still held by third parties - what happens if they disappear? How should initiatives like this safely archive their stories, and keep them in context?
Pippa Gardner talked about Glasgow's Future Cities project, for which they have £24 million to develop. It's about "people and data", but she was here to talk about data. There's the Data Innovation Engagement (which apparently needs a better acronym) and Glasgow's data portal which has already launched. Not all of the data on their is 'properly' open, but it's more open than it was before. There's a maps portal coming soon. Follow @openglasgow to keep up to date. Someone asked how they can avoid inadvertantly widening the digital divide by making all this data available - as it will only improve things for people who already have understanding and access. Pippa said there's a dedicate group in the Council working on widening digital participation, so they're involved.
Duncan Bain, and MPhil student at the University of Edinburgh, talked about Open Architecture. He says it's hard to define 'knowledge' and 'data' in architecture; architects create drawings/representations, not buildings. There are efforts towards opening certain aspects of this, like wikihouse.cc and the Open Architecture Network, but the culture of the architecture world, and where the money is, seems to be preventing things from going in the same direction as software development any time soon.
Here are livestreams of the talks by Jennifer Jones: one and two and a twitter timeline by Sheila Macneill.
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EdinburghApps
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Prewired 3
Our third Prewired event went smoothly, with 20 young people (about 4 new) and 7 or so parents attending, plus 8 mentors. So lower signups than usual (a few cancellations due to school commitments), but we decided not to do a big publicity push and see how it ran with a smaller group. I didn't notice much difference, since they organise themselves into smaller groups anyway to work on different things. I think next time we'll try to reach our capacity of 40.
We had a big group working on a variety of Python projects (games, basics, algorithms, I'm not sure what else..), a small group doing front-end web, and quite a few doing amazing things with Scratch.
Every week I discover new things these super-talented young people are doing with their time, and it won't be long before many of them are spending a lot of time mentoring their peers as well as working on their own projects.
Nantas came by to talk about what he does with the University's Robotics lab, including the challenges of making humanoid robots play football, and the state of the art, two-million-pounds, full sized humanoid robot that is moving to Edinburgh in the near future. Definitely stuff to get young people excited about learning to code.
We've been trying to encourage them to code between Prewired sessions, too, and about half of them said they had. I hope by the next time all of them have, and I'm really excited to see what they're capable of making in a few months time!
But...
Some of the young people attending are disadvantaged by not being able to bring their own laptop, or having only really old laptops which can't support modern browsers and therefore have trouble even executing the JavaScript their writing (true story).
We'd love to be able to pay for a set of simple but up-to-date laptops that we could lend to the attendees who don't have their own during sessions. This at least will put them on a level playing field with the others during the sessions, and I suspect that many of them have adequate desktop machines or family laptops at home.
Prewired runs on a budget of volunteer blood, sweat and tears, and zero pounds. We're lucky enough to be able to use space in the University Informatics building for free, and there are no shortage of keen mentors and helpers willing to chip in their time (and in some cases cash for snacks).
So if you work for a company who might be able to support the purchase of resources for our young coders, or know someone who does, then please get in touch!
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The Launch of Prewired
Several weeks of debating and planning following Young Rewired State finally came to fruition on the 16th of October, with our first Prewired event.
Thirty eight kidsyoung people arrived between 9:30 and 10 on that
Wednesday morning (it was half term week in Scotland, so we weren't pulling
them out of school), grabbed some kindly donated Google swag, made name badges
with stickers and felt-tipped pens, and sat down for two and a half hours of
lightly guided learning.
They were between the ages of three and eighteen, although the three to six year olds were more there to be tagging along with older siblings or University staff. It's obviously impossible to divide attendees up by age and decide what to work with them on, as older definitely does not mean more experienced. We had decided on no lower bound for the age limit, and no lower bound for experience either, figuring that the only real requirement is enthusiasm about programming. There was a huge mix of interests and abilities, and we let them decide for themselves which topics would be worth listening to.
We also had about fifteen students, University staff or industry professionals along as mentors.
After a few minutes of welcomes, where most of the room were willing to introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to learn ("Python", "Scratch" and "more about programming in general" were popular ones) we kicked off with three five minute introductions: to HTML and CSS (beginner), to HTML5 Geolocation (intermediate) and to Python's Natural Language Toolkit (advanced). They then had the chance to spend 40 minutes in a hands-on session for whichever of these they chose. The groups were very evenly spread, and despite a few hiccups with Python installations on Windows and Chrome not playing nice with geolocation (worked through thanks largely to the mentors) most people got some code up and running and appropriately hacked about with by the end.
We took a break for juice, crisps, chocolate and fruit, plus a bit of hardware tinkering. We'd borrowed a Nodecopter, but hadn't managed to get it charged in time so it wasn't in the air, but there were still plenty of people interested in looking at the code to control it. We also had a demo of a robot arm, which could be controlled by an Android app connected to a Python server, which had been written over the summer by one of our mentors.
Next up were three more lightning talks: introduction to Scratch (beginner), doing cool things with Redstone Circuits in Minecraft (intermediate) and introduction to PyGame (intermediate-advanced). The following hands-on session for Scratch was under-attended, possibly ousted by the allure of Minecraft, but the PyGame session had over a third of the group and made some great progress, which was awesome.
We finished a little late, but still managed to have time for a quick demo of a football playing robot from the nearby robotics lab, and a few attendees who took their time dragging themselves away from their screens.
I'm told that overall it was a success. I was concerned because I was
generally called upon when something was going wrong, so my perspectively was
weighted towards the negative. But it wasn't too chaotic, none of the
kidsattendees played up, and as far as we could tell they were
doing something in some way productive at all times.
A lot of them had had little to no programming experience before that morning, and I really hope they were able to take away something positive and, most importantly, feel encouraged to try things out by themselves at home. Plenty, too, had enough experience that they were calling out to correct the speakers, and helping their peers to get things working. It's a huge challenge to find enough activities to engage so many different levels of experience and interest, and I don't think we did a bad job.
Our next Prewired event will be on the 30th of October, and we're running them bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from now on. They will be henceforth less structured. Our primary aim is to help young people to realise that with programming (and related areas) they can create anything, express themselves, and change the world. We don't wish to enforce a curriculum, but encourage them to explore areas they are interested in, learn how to teach themselves and figure out how to make what they want, and most of all to persuade them not to be afraid to experiment - to hack - and to just keep trying if it doesn't work first time. To get them excited before they become jaded and before this society's stereotypes have a chance to impact on them.
You can find out more about Prewired at prewired.org, and join the mailing list there too.
Photos and feedback
Here are some of the photos from the day:
If you took some that you'd like us to add, then please send them to hello@prewired.org!
Similarly, send any feedback you have about the event to us that way, as well.
Resources
I'll update this post (as well as the website) with resources from the speakers and mentors as I get hold of them.
Beginning HTML and CSS:
HTML5 Geolocation:
Building a chatbot with Python's Natural Language Toolkit:
Intro to Scratch:
Minecraft Redstone Circuits:
Intro to PyGame:
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ScotGovCamp #scotgc13
Writeup imminent...
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