A Beautiful Mash-Up

On Friday, 250 Year 5-8 students, their teachers and more than 20 mentors from the technology industry experienced the magic than can happen when education and industry work together.

The first ever Christchurch Mash Up for primary schools was initiated by Michael, Tim and Bryn from Code Club Aotearoa and many other parties with an interest in getting young people into technology and design thinking. These included Bridget and Carl from the FabLab, Caitlin Duncan from UC and a huge number of a volunteers from technology firms around Christchurch. The format was based on the highly successful High School Mash up held last year at the EPIC Hub.

250 students filled the Selwyn House Atrium

What is a Mash Up you might well be wondering?

Well, I'm still not entirely sure of the strict definition myself(which is probably slightly alarming given that I played a small role in helping to organise the event!) but one thing I know for sure is that this Mash Up event provided rich, authentic, highly engaging, real world learning experiences for the 250 students lucky enough to be there.

The challenge was to work in teams of 5-8 students to identify real world problems, gradually whittling down their list to one problem that really bugged them. They had to work to find solutions eventually planning and designing their best idea. There were mentors for each team who were industry professionals and there were pods of "pros" such as Bridget and Carl with their 3d printers for prototyping, Bryn with his incredible array of sensors and Esther with her marketing skills so teams could get feedback on their logos, company names and guidance with their pitching.

Bridget McKendry from The Fablab prototyping with teams

There were many steps to the process and the students were learning all sorts of new terms including-

• Ideation
• Market Validation
• Solutioneering
• Curation
• Pitching

This was a very intense and exhilarating three hours and the learners were so engaged from the get-go; the atmosphere was electric! 

One of the many highlights of this event was the arrival of Claudia Batten, kiwi entrepreneur. She had a very powerful message for us all.

"You only fail if you give up. Keep trying." 

What a great message; have a growth mindset. Her message was empowering and inspiring for the young Christchurch learners. 

A highlight for the teachers was being able to leave the students with the mentors to attend a workshop led by Caitlin Duncan from University of Canterbury. Caitlin shared her research findings around primary school children learning to code and Initial Learning Environments such as CodeAcademy and CodeAvengers. It was a great chance for teachers to chat about the computer science in our schools and what our next steps are. 

The afternoon drew to a close with selected teams sharing their pitches with the three judges, followed by a question session a la Dragon's Den. 

Finally, a prize giving. Prizes were then awarded for a range of things including Best Pitch, Best Solution and Best Teamwork with prize money from the Christchurch City Council. 

Cobham Intermediate pitches their virtual pet with emotion sensors

It was an amazing afternoon and I feel grateful to have had a small role working with the industry professionals to bring Code Club Aotearoa's dream to fruition.  I learned lots from working with this amazingly dedicated group of people who want to see young people have the opportunity to join the thriving technology industry. Their belief in the ability of the children of Christchurch to achieve amazing things in such a short period of time was a reminder to me that we should never underestimate young learners. Huge thanks to Michael Trengrove and Tim Hatherley-Greene and also to Bridget McKendry for your unfailing belief in and dedication to New Zealand's young people.  

Amazing things can be achieved when schools work with professionals to solve wicked problems. How can our schools benefit from this model? How can we create more opportunities for education and industry to create magic together? 

Caitlin Duncan talks with teachers about teaching coding at primary school

Here's an article about the event from Stuff.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/67464535/The-squiggly-path-to-tech-success

A Celebration of Design Thinking

This week's topic of Design Thinking has challenged me the most of all the previous HackYrClass topics. I have a job share role- I'm responsible for Literacy and Maths and this challenge has really got me thinking about how to incorporate a Design Thinking mindset into my programme.

I've pored over readings on the subject this week and found the IDEO Design Thinking Toolkit particularly informative and practical.

What all this reading has really made me question is how my amazing job share partner and I can
integrate more seamlessly? A true integrated approach such as Challenge- Based Learning would enable us to blur the lines between curriculum areas, eventually getting to a point where an overriding challenge or problem would encompass all curriculum needs. We are fortunate to be an International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme school and this type of approach meshes easily with the PYP framework. I know there are many amazing PYP teachers using a Design Thinking approach from which all curriculum needs are met.  I will continue to give this lots of thought.......

In the meantime, I would love to celebrate what does happen in our school. My teaching partner, Liz Fairhall together with our team leader, Linda Baran have created an amazing Makerspace at Selwyn House. This space is equipped with all manner of tools to enable our girls to create. There are wood and metal working tools, electronics equipments including circuitry and robotics equipment, tools for working with fabrics and of course computers and green screening. We recently acquired our first 3d printer which the girls are over the moon about; as are many of the parents!

I need to celebrate a recent Design Thinking inquiry led by Liz. Last term, our Unit Of Inquiry was called, "Straight to the Blog" and was a Digital Citizenship inquiry which explored how we make a contribution in online spaces. One of the challenges of the digital era identified by the girls is that often we lose special memories which come to us digitally because of a lack of a way to save them, for example special texts or emails. Liz used the Design Thinking framework with the girls to get them to solve this problem. In the Makerspace, they designed, prototyped and created a solution to this challenge. Some girls used a hacker approach and reinvented an existing tool; others created something new from scratch. All creations were unique and we were very impressed by the inventiveness of the girls. Here are some of the girls' creations.

Maddie's Photographic Wooden Coasters

Elise's photographic jewellery made from broken CDs

Ella's photographic/ email Rubik's Cube

Georgia's teeny-tiny photo viewer- the photo slides into a false base. Very cool! 

I'd like to give a shout-out here to the amazing Bridget McKendry of the Christchurch Makercrate. To my mind, she is the ultimate Design Thinker with a real ability to encourage innovation and nurture a Design Thinking mindset. She inspired the Selwyn House team enormously when we visited the crate last year as we started on the Makerspace journey. She is incredibly passionate about MakerEd and my Maker-minded daughter adores her and has learnt so much from her. If you want to see authentic Design Thinking in action, Bridget is your one stop shop! Thanks, Bridget!