Adrian Oldknow [email protected] 6Th Feb 2018 Good
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Inspirational Technology for kids (of all ages) Adrian Oldknow [email protected] 6th Feb 2018 Good evening. I am very grateful to the IET and IMechE for inviting me along this evening. It’s just a year since I met Hamish McNaughton, David James and John Halliday in our local Wilke’s Head pub to plan tonight’s talk. Of course much has changed in that time, so maybe a better title now would be `Confessions of a Volunteer Ambassador’. I just wonder if any of you are old enough to remember James Burke and his Connections programmes from 1978? That’s really what my life has been all about: Only Connect! I’ve brought along a few of my diaries to help steer my path through this talk. Going back to Saturday 3rd December 2016 I find that is when my great friend Phil Moffitt, IET Schools Liaison Officer for Medway and Kent, took me along as his partner to the SE IMechE Christmas lunch in Tunbridge Wells! Phil gave a presentation on the iSTEM+ approach, of which more later, and we ran a hands-on workshop using a variety of kit with the BBC micro:bit. Another of the guests at the meeting was last year’s IET President, Prof Jeremy Watson, who lives in Worthing. On Tuesday 13th December I was the warm act before Christmas lunch with our local retirees’ `Beta Plus Computer Club’ where I talked introduced some of the current commercial robotic toys: Edison, Sphero & Ollie, OhBot and Meccanoid. I also went on to talk a bit about the sorts of technology such as Raspberry Pi, Crumble and BBC micro:bit which are being used in the Primary and Secondary schools I am working in. We also did some programming using `Make Code’ blocks. So that is the background to how I come to be with you here in Crawley tonight. This is the latest gig in what has been a very frenetic and rewarding few weeks. So I thought I’d begin with a report on what I’m up to at the moment. Then I’ll take a look back to what got me into all this. Then take a look forward to where it might all be heading. And from there, to have a discussion about how we can all make a contribution to helping schools better prepare their students for a very exciting technological future. On 15th January I was at a workshop hosted by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (where I am a Liveryman) for the parliamentary Digital Policy Alliance (DPA). One of the planks of Tony Blair’s `Education, Education, Education’ programme was an `Educational Super Highway’, which went on to become the `National Grid for Learning’. Many of the regional `Grids for Learning’ have struggled on and are still providing connections and services to half the schools in the country. The commercial operators like BT, EasyNet, EE and Virgin are seeing value in having direct connections in the educational community and the Government is now considering investing in the newly renamed National Educational Network (NEN) as an effective means to get careers advice and other information into schools. I am now working on ways to use it to help support STEM teachers in primary and secondary schools do more to inspire their students. The DPA secured a partnership deal in Plymouth last year to develop a digital/STEM/careers/21stC skills centre to serve schools in and around the city, with an emphasis on cyber security. I am now facilitating similar agreements in Portsmouth, Reading and the East of England. As part of this work I am now involved with an educational initiative supporting the new Cisco UK `Smarter Rural and Coastal Towns’ development. On 23rd January, I was at the University of Chichester, my former employer, discussing the development of a centre to serve schools in and around Chichester and Bognor – now the home of Roll-Royce cars! The University has secured a large investment from the Coast to Capital LEP to develop a STEM Park at the Bognor campus, opposite Butlins. This involves an ambitious programme of degree-apprenticeships for local employers, starting with Software Engineering. Along with many other potential providers, the University of Chichester has just had their application to provide apprentice-degrees for non-Levy paying SMEs turned down. On 24th January I made my annual pilgrimage to the BETT 2018 show at Excel, London. This was opened by the Skills Minister, Ann Milton, and followed by a keynote on changing education by Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s global VP for education. I was there to meet the new CEO of the Micro:bit Educational Foundation (MEF), Gareth Stockdale, seconded from the BBC. The Foundation has ARM, BBC, IET, Microsoft and Nominet among its partners. I am one of the first bunch of Micro:bit Ambassadors just appointed, and was there to present ideas about projects to get micro:bits used to stimulate STEM education in Primary and Secondary schools. This also involved meeting the DfE’s EdTech & Digital Skills Policy team on their stand. One of the projects we are discussing is code-named ROM: Robotics On Micro:bits. The idea is that every primary school should teach students to write code for simple sensing and control applications on the micro:bit using the powerful free Microsoft `MakeCode’ block editor. Then small groups of students would create their own robotics projects, and present them to their teachers, parents and peers. That’s called PROM: Primary Robotics On Micro:bits. Key Stage 3 (11-14) students in Secondary schools could then build on the ideas with more sophistication through EPROM: `Extended Projects for Robotics On Micro:bits’. We are planning a pilot project of 1000 UK schools as part of the Government’s `2018 Year of Engineering’, supported by prestigious partners, including Rotary UK & Ireland. We reckon £1k would equip any primary school with the necessary materials, micro:bits, electronics and other resources. So £20m would equip every primary school in the UK. We are also discussing making this a global STEM education project, supported by multinational partners including Rotary International. At BETT 2017, Microsoft had a very big stand promoting their new initiative called `Hacking STEM’. This was built around a free plug-in for Excel, called Project Cordoba, to interface it with Arduino micro-controllers. Just before Christmas I managed to get it to work with micro:bits using both serial and radio connections for data-logging and control. So I also met with Cordoba’s chief developer from Microsoft US, David Myka – where we also discussed using micro:bits with other Windows Applications, such as Scratch, Small Basic, GeoGebra and Logger Pro – and encouraging GCSE/A-level/BTech students to develop their own educational apps with micro:bits using professional tools such as Azure. This is an extension of our current Student Digital Ambassador programme, which is built on the success of our Erasmus+ `Kids Inspiring Kids in STEM’ project in Finland, Hungary, Spain and UK, directed by ex-BT CCITE colleague, Dr. Tony Houghton. The Department for Education hosts Ministers of Education from around the world at the Education World Forum. This was addressed on January 22nd by Damian Hinds, the new Secretary of State for Education and MP for East Hampshire. “… preparing students for success in the fourth industrial revolution, can hardly be more apt or more timely. If you think about all the changes going on all over the world, whether that’s artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, face recognition, voice computing, autonomous vehicles – any one of these things on their own has the power to be revolutionary. Taken together, they certainly do constitute something of the sort of magnitude to turn a revolution.” On January 26th I was at the `Shaping Portsmouth 2018’ conference with colleagues from Airbus Defence & Space. The final address was a tour-de-force from the Council Leader, Donna Jones, on the future developments envisaged in and around Portsmouth, with an emphasis on `Inspiring the Next Generation’. I began working in the area in 2014 with Ian Potter, Head of Bay House School, Gosport. Ian had been engaged by the Hampshire 14-19 Careers Service to lead a project to improve the educational attainment of school-leavers through inspirational STEM activities. Part of this was to prepare a bid to the Solent Local Enterprise Partnership for a STEM Centre on the HMS Daedalus Enterprise Zone to support local schools. The LEP had already funded the development of the state-of-the-art CEMAST centre there by Fareham College (Centre of Excellence in Engineering, Manufacturing and Advanced Skills Training). I had already worked with Derek Peaple, Head of Park House School, to develop what we call an `iSTEM+ cluster’ of schools in Newbury to embed integrated STEM learning into the Curriculum. Derek and I were members of the development group established by the British Interplanetary Society for a cross-curricular `Space, Science & Technology A-level’ with DfE funding. Ian called together a group of schools, academies and colleges in Gosport, who took the decision to launch their own `Gosport iSTEM+ cluster’ in May 2014. There is an IET.TV video on the iSTEM+ approach and a YouTube presentation. In July 2015 I made contact with the Gosport MP, Caroline Dinenage, who was then Equalities Minister in Nicky Morgan’s DfE. We met in September when she agreed to promote the iSTEM+ approach within the Government. Gomer Junior School developed its own gSTEM curriculum in which every class spends one morning a week on practical problem-solving cross-curricular STEM projects around a variety of inspiring themes.