I know you guys love hearing about what I’m up to so here are a few fantastic events that I’ll be appearing it either running workshops or giving talks – it’d be great if you could come along and join in the fun!
Firstly, this weekend I’m taking the pi-top Champions to The National Museum of Computing and Bletchley Park museum for a weekend of training and fun – the most exciting thing about it is that on Sunday 19th the Champions will be running workshops in the National Museum of Computing, showing off exactly why we chose them – I’m so excited about this weekend and hope some of you can join and bring your kids along to what will be an incredible day of opportunities. Let us know you’re coming by signing up here!
I’m really excited about the Champions day as I feel like we’re bringing together some of the best of the best when it comes to running workshops, training and all things Raspberry Pi – we’ve picked an amazing team of people for our Champions and I can’t wait to share further details with you all!
I’m looking forward to joining Nic Hughes at the London CAS conference on Saturday 25th February. Nic and I are working together with him leading a Crumble workshop and me leading a Physical Computing Raspberry Pi workshop. It’s always good fun working with Nic and we’re looking forward to inspiring some teachers to innovate their computer science classrooms.
Raspberry Pi is celebrating it’s 5th year at the Junction in Cambridge on 4th and 5th of March and I’ll be there both days and doing a talk on the importance of teaching children to code on Saturday 4th at 1.30. The birthday party is always a great fun community event and tickets can be bought here.
Throughout March and April, I’m running workshops through pi-top for a number of great charitable groups such as STEMSussex, BECSLink and London CLC which will be great fun and I’m hoping to be able to do something for International Women’s Day on 8th March.
</edit> I forgot to mention my own event – Coding Evening for Teachers, in Twickenham on Friday 24th March – tickets are here.</edit>
At the end of March, I’m VERY excited to be attending three incredible events – first up, the NAACE conference in Leicester (28th-29th March), where I’m running not one, but TWO break out sessions – one for pi-top and one talking about the amazing Active Lit as a tool for writing text adventures. Looking at the speaker list, I have a feeling this is going to be a very exciting event and it seems that the people at NAACE are really determined to make it a very successful couple of days.
Next up is PiWars in Cambridge – I’ve always been a big fan of Mike Horne and Tim Richardson, especially their really helpful CamJam EduKits for teaching physical computing with Raspberry Pi so I was incredibly honoured to be asked by them to be a judge at PiWars, an event so popular it’s had to extend to cover two days instead of just one! The blurb for the event describes it as:
Pi Wars is a challenge-based robotics competition in which Raspberry Pi-controlled robots are created by teams and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. There are prizes awarded at the end of the day. Last year, we had teams from schools, families and groups of hobbyists and 30 of these teams competed for a full day of robot fun and games! Pi Wars takes place in Cambridge, UK and is open to anyone from around the world. It is run by the same team that organises the Cambridge Raspberry Jam.
How much fun does that sound? There are still spectator tickets available if you want to bring your children or even your class up to inspire them to create their own robots and one of the two days is dedicated entirely to schools and youth groups!
Following on the heels of PiWars is ATI 2017 in Malvern. Primarily an Apple event, this year ATI has extended to include some more general computer science skills, particularly Raspberry Pi and the lovely Joe Moretti asked me to suggest some workshops. I feel like a bit of an interloper seeing my name surrounded by some of the big names in Apple Education, but I’m really excited about offering some Physical computing and Minecraft hacking information for some teachers, most of whom will be completely new to Raspberry Pi and then entire Pi ecosystem. ATI looks like n exciting event and I know that the other presenters are all incredibly inspiring so I’m really glad to be part of the team – there are still tickets available and it’s worth going along just to meet people like Joe, Mark Anderson, Catherine Jessey and Jon Neale, all of whom I’ve seen present before and know are incredibly inspiring!
You’d think that’d be enough events, but no… in May, I’ve been invited by the STEM Centre in York to run a ‘Scratch Roadshow‘ taking sessions to Truro, Bristol, Swindon and Reading. This will be an intro to Scratch for primary school teachers who want to build their confidence a little – the best thing about it is that there is a bursary which makes the training completely free so it’s well worth letting your local primary school know if you think they could do with a boost!
Anyway, there are more events later in the year, but that will do for now! I hope you can come along to some of these events and please do come over and say hi – I love meeting you all ‘IRL’. And remember – if you can’t come to any of these events but are still interested in the type of training I can do, please drop me an email cat@crossover.solutions – I offer workshops and CPD training bespoke to your school or group’s needs!
Cat Lamin 