I’ve just finished doing the end of term educational conferences with Lee Stott who is a Microsoft Evangelist and a genuine nice guy. I’ve been speaking and running workshops, on Microsoft’s new mobile development platform TouchDevelop as well as speaking about Games Based Learning and the use of MineCraft in education.
TouchDevelop is a brilliant platform and is quite unique in that it runs entirely within an HTML5 web browser, which makes it truly cross platform. It will run on PCs, Laptops as well as Smartphones and tablets running Windows, iOS or Android. For me the outstanding feature of TouchDevelop is that students can create APPs easily, without having to go through a tricky process and they can then see their APPs running on their device, whether it is an iPhone, iPad, Surface or Nexus tablet. Whatever the device is, they can see something they have created running on their device. Everything they create in TouchDevelop is saved to the cloud, so its very easy for students to begin writing an APP on a PC in the classroom and then log back into their account on a mobile device at home (or even on the way home) and continue working on the same APP.
The first conference I spoke at, on TouchDevelop, was at Microsoft’s UK Windows Gaming Awareness Event at Birmingham City University on the 26th of March 2013. I did a presentation and the always risky “live demo” :-). Luckily it went well and I was invited to speak on TouchDevelop at 2 more conferences.
Games Britannia
The first of these was Games Britannia at Sheffield Hallam University, organised by Dr. Jacob Habgood from Sheffield Hallam University, who himself worked in the games industry for Gremlin Interactive and later on Infogrames/Atari. Games Britannia was a week long event from the 10th to the 14th of June 2013, Tuesday to Thursday of which, was a series of workshops for KS3 & KS4 high school pupils to attend on many different aspects of the games industry. They had well over 300 pupils in attendance at the conference over the 3 days, attending workshops such as Concept Art, PS3 programming, CryEngine Art, Minecraft, Kinect Motion Capture and of course TouchDevelop.
I ran two morning sessions on TouchDevelop and it was great to see students aged around 14-16 really engaging in programming at a level they could understand. Being able to see them actually create something that worked within a 2 hour workshop was a thrill and one of the things I really love about TouchDevelop.
I also ran an afternoon workshop on Games Based Learning and I let students try out my free educational games (xGames and Kinect Games) which make use of gaming hardware to revise and engage students in subjects like Maths and English. The games went down very well, although by the end of the day my “Name that tune” pop music quiz was being replayed a lot. However it was interesting to see how that particular age group engaged with the games and which ones worked best with them. With the age group in attendance my xBots game was certainly the most popular, I’m guessing because there were a lot of teenage boys in attendance and that game is partially an FPS. However my Kinect Games and in particular my NoNeed4Green went down very well too.
On Tuesday evening I was fortunate enough to attend an amazing talk from Gary Carr, Creative Director of Lionhead Studios. Gary has worked with industry legend Peter Molyneux for the past 20 years and is responsible for the art in titles such as Barbarian 1 & 2, Populous 1 & 2, Theme Park, Theme Hospital and the Fable games. He had some fascinating insights into what is like working in the ever changing games industry and I’m hopefully Gary will come up later this year and speak with some of the 150+ games students at our new West College Scotland.
In between conferences I had a day in Leicester where I actually did a bit of shopping, although I was almost refused my Scottish ten pound note when the lady serving me asked what it was and if I would rather pay on card. I’ve been told repeatedly since that I should have said “I think you’ll find pal that’s legal tender”.
However, that day I also got to visit Leicester College and spoke to a great guy called Chris Seaton who is Computing Supervisor there. It was very interesting to hear the challenges he faces with the adoption of learning technology, which seem to be the same throughout education. I also got the chance to plug TouchDevelop to some of his computing lecturers and it was great to visit another FE college while on my travels.
CAS Conference 2013
On Thursday I headed with Lee to Birmingham University for the Computing at Schools annual conference. This is a great event which is probably the biggest educational conference for School Computing teachers in the UK. I ran a workshop at CAS last year on Games Based Learning, but this year I helped Lee with one of the plenary keynote presentations to the whole conference on the Friday morning. So I got to present and demonstrate TouchDevelop to around 200 of the most motivated computing teachers from around the UK, which was a big thrill, although a bit scary. We gave out around 200 TouchDevelop books and copies of my games development based curriculum. I also ran a workshop on TouchDevelop later on that day, which was attended by over 30 teachers and in a short 50 min session it was good to see so many teachers quickly picking up the basics of TouchDevelop and starting to create their own apps on a whole host of devices from Google Nexus tablets to MacBooks.
One of the things I love about these conferences is the people you meet and I met a variety of highly motivated teachers from different sectors, including a number from Scotland. I also found out while at the conference, that the Scottish government had announced £400,000 over 2 years to CAS Scotland to help support CPD training for Teachers in Computer Science, which is fantastic news.
College Development Network
The following week I attended two conferences in Scotland, this time without Lee Stott. The first was the Computing, ICT and Digital Media Annual Conference at City of Glasgow College on Monday 17th June 2013 and the second was the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: Learning Through Gaming conference at Dundee College on the 20th of June. Both conferences were organised by Gerry Dougan from the College Development Network (formerly Scotland’s Colleges).
At the first event I presented mainly about TouchDevelop to the audience who were made up of Heads of Departments and senior lecturers from around Scotland and I covered an exciting project I had organised for Gerry making use of Minecraft.
At the second event in Dundee, Chris van der Kuyl from Brightsolid gave a fascinating and motivational presentation on why games should be used in education. Chris was responsible for bringing MineCraft to the XBOX360 which became the fastest and biggest selling game on XBOX live marketplace ever, selling something like 6.5 million copies in North America alone. He gave some fascinating insight into MineCraft and how it could be used in education. He also spoke about E3 and showed the video below of a wonderful looking creative game called Project Spark coming to XBOX1 later this year.
I presented at the conference on Games for Learning and demonstrated my xGames and Kinect Games. I also went into detail about an exciting Minecraft project that I had organised for Gerry Dougan, which was the brain spark of Derek Robertson from Education Scotland. I will do a separate blog post on this project later to do it justice, but in summary 8 teams of 4 from Scotland and Norway competed over 3 weeks in the virtual world of Minecraft via a shared online server, to create their vision of what an “Ideal Learning Environment” would look like. What they came up with, the hours they put in and the learning that went on inside the world, truly blew my mind.
HEA STEM : Teaching and Learning Programming for Mobile and Tablet Devices
My final conference, before my summer holidays could properly begin, was a Programming for Mobile & Tablet Devices event at London MET University on the 25th of June 2013. It was literally a flying visit to London, down on Easyjet on Monday evening and back up Tuesday evening. I was reunited with Lee Stott and he presented on the Opportunities of Microsoft devices and services and I followed him with my now much rehearsed, presentation and demonstration of TouchDevelop, which you can download from here.
I must thank Jacob Habgood from Sheffield Hallam University, Simon Humphreys from CAS, Gerry Dougan from the College Development Network, Yanguo Jing from London MET and of course Lee Stott from Microsoft for having me at their events.
If you want to try TouchDevelop go to www.touchdevelop.com
You can download my games development curriculum from here and you can watch my video tutorials for it here.
You can download a free book on TouchDevelop from Microsoft research by clicking here.
David Renton's educational blog 