Well, it happened - the first of its kind in Preston.
Keen to spread the message about the need to introduce computing into schools, I organised a 'Computing At School' event to take place at our school, Our Lady's Catholic High School.
Planning to keep to the three aims to Educate, Engage and Encourage the event was posted on Eventbrite and interest grew from there. Some of the teachers' unions were taking industrial action on the same day, so I received apologies from some who were interested but would not be able to attend. In all 42, people signed up for the event.
We planned to stream the event live using ustream.tv . Those that watched said the sound quality was fine, but the image quality of the video was poor. I think the compression / optimisation for the web did not help. Also, the frequency of the adverts were irritating.
At 4.00 pm as our guests arrived they were welcomed with a live music performance from Peter Robinson and Stuart McKnight our resident guitarists for the evening.
I was first to present on the theme "Computing. At School?", with the intention of sharing some opinions about why computing should be in school. It can be difficult to view the presentation in the video, so the presentation is also available just below.
Computing. At School?
The second presentation was an insight into A and AS level computing at Cardinal Newman College, Preston one of our partner sixth form colleges. Rob Wildig and Susannah Worsley shared some examples of student projects.
Dr Simon Platt, UCLan described a computing project he was engaged in with NASA to control a rocket which will be taking high resolution images of the sun's corona. As well as taking and storing these large images, the rocket will also broadcast some of these back to Earth.
Anthony Ball presented the last talk of the evening. He shared with us some of the projects he has developed in his software engineering company 'Computing Data Ltd' as well as some work on retro computer games. His slides are available just below.
Projects at Computing Data
Our next event is planned to take place on Thursday 20th October 2011 with two further dates planned 1st March 2012 and 17th May 2012. You can sign up here on our event page for any one or all of them. The next event will be more 'hands on' with programming workshops in Scratch, Python and Greenfoot planned.
Any feedback would be appreciated from you regarding quality of videos, the themes of the events etc.
