This blog post is part of a graded assignment for the Coursera MOOC, Learning How to Learn. As an older student, or lifelong learner, or simply someone stepping out of your normal trade to learn a knew skill, hobby, language, you may feel your mind is not up to the task, or that frequently the […]
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Beechen Bots at FLL OEC, Pamplona
So I have already documented my son’s team’s experience of the UK FLL championships in Loughborough this year, and made a post about the inspiring aura of the FLL OEC championships in Pamplona, Spain. I feel I have to describe the emotional journey of the Beechen Bots’ experience in Pamplona. Day 0 I’ll describe the […]
Robots vs Humans at FLL OEC, Pamplona
Robots or Humans? At the Open European Championships of the First Lego League (FLL OEC) in Pamplona Spain last week, it was definitely the young humans in the lead, while the impressive robots took second place. On the face of it, FLL is a competition in… designing and building a Lego Mindstorms robot to perform […]
FLL: First Lego League UK Final 2014
It was a privilege to be a spectator at the First Lego League (FLL) UK Finals at Loughborough University yesterday, where my son’s school team (Beechen Bots from Beechen Cliff School) had qualified in this youth championship for Lego robot design, problem solving and engineering. The thirty teams had members ranging from 9 to 15 […]
Code or Die!
New Year may be an arbitrary line in an arbitrary system for measuring the passage of time (so reports Oliver Burkeman in last week’s Guardian magazine ), and the rituals of new year resolutions may seem doomed to fail. Nonetheless I decided to approach my Code Everyday mandate again with the renewed optimism that this […]
TEDxBristol
Like many people, I enjoy a good TED talk. At typically 15 minutes or less, they are only ever a window into someone else’s viewpoint or wisdom, but it really is not hard to find something new, each time you go on the site that will inspire, provoke, reinforce or contradict. I heard that TED […]
Summer Tech School – What was I thinking?
It is well documented here that there is a lot I don’t know about software. And yet, I should respect what I do know, and consolidate what i am learning. I have decided to run a small Summer tech School over the school summer holidays, for my wife and children and a couple of friends/colleagues and their children. This […]
Horses for Coursera’s
So today I started my first Coursera course, snappily entitled Developing Ideas for New Companies: The 1st step in Entrepreneurship. One month ago I had not even heard of Coursera, but I suppose that is the way of the web. My perceptions of time just need constantly re-adjusting. Coursera, in case you didn’t know, is a site where […]
Why Blog?
Why am I recording my journey back to technology? There is not a specific end goal, rather I have started walking a particular path. Along the way I expect to get lost, find other paths, find a sense of direction, understand more, realise that I understand nothing, feel great, feel humbled, feel despair, but hopefully […]
What is Crispy Smoked Web?
For most of my adult life I have worked in IT for business, all kinds of business of all kinds of sizes. But more and more the focus has been on the I rather than the T, and it’s the T that drew me into this as a career choice (and degree choice) in the […]