A Review of my Day at Exabytes19

Welcome to my latest blog where I am going review my day at the fantastic Exabytes19 conference. I considered doing a top 5 highlights for this blog but it wouldn’t do it justice as I had more than 5 highlights!

I first came across Exabytes19 from Alan O’Donohoe (@teknoteacher) who leads the Exa Foundation. Their mission is to ‘support computing education and promote safe, secure and appropriate use of tech.’ (@ExaFoundation). Alan messaged me and asked if I would share on my twitter the application form for presenting at ExaBytes. I shared the link and also successfully applied. Exabytes19 is the ExaFoundation’s 4^th annual conference. Throughout the year they also run smaller training sessions around the country called Exabits.

When I began to research previous Exabytes, I came across so much positive feedback, with several people describing it as ‘the best CPD training I’ve had all year’. I liked the idea that the conference wasn’t enormous and there would only be under 100 people attending. This would make it easier to network with others and not get lost in a huge crowd.

A few weeks before the event, Alan published a draft of the breakout sessions that were available for delegates to attend. There were 5 slots in the day with 4 sessions going on simultaneously – I wish that human cloning was a thing as I would have loved to have attended every single session and it was so hard to just choose one from each time slot! Topics included Microbit wearables, Scratch Maths, Game design, VR & AR, transitioning from block coding to python, assessing ICT, code club activities, cardboard crafting with tech and more! There were also keynotes from Sue Sentence on Computing strategies and Hannah Dee on the awesomeness of Ada Lovelace.

The conference was at a lovely hotel in Northampton which had great facilities and a fantastic choice of food for lunch! When I arrived, I met some familiar faces; Nic Hughes (@duck_star) is part of the 3BM team who run sessions for Brent Computing Leaders and 15 year old Josh Lowe (all_about_code) and his dad David, who I had met at the LGfL conference this year, after Josh introduced EduBlocks, an online resource he had created when he was 12 that puts python code into a block coding format.

I also got two meet two great people who I had been communicating with a lot recently on twitter; Andy Cowan (@Mr_C_ICT) and Michelle Ainley (@computingmissa). Both are specialist ICT teachers so it was great to hang out with people who actually had the same job as me! Something I haven’t had since I was a class teacher, 3 years ago.    

The conference began with the sad news that Sue Sentence was unable to attend the conference for personal reasons, however this gave Hannah Dee (@handee) more time to talk about Ada Lovelace, a computing pioneer who I knew little about and was fascinated to learn about. From what Hannah told us, it made me think how in awe Ada would be if she was alive today and saw how computing had evolved over time. Hannah said she was the first computational thinker and this was all before a computer had even be invented!

I then presented my seminar, a talk that I had presented last year at the EduTech Show on ‘how to enrich the curriculum through image, video and animation’. I was really pleased to have almost every seat in the room filled – quite the opposite to the number of people I had at the EduTech show! The presentation went really well and I got some good feedback from the attendees. I hope they can take some of my ideas with them back to their classrooms.

Afterwards, I attended Michelle Ainley’s talk on Scratch Maths, this is a website of free resources that incorporates maths skills with Scratch. It encourages a deeper level of thinking when working with algorithms and shape and pattern work, and this was just the first lesson example that Michelle showed us. We were given an activity where we had to write what would be produced from a small list of block coding. The tricky part was, it was the same blocks in each example but in a different order. The blocks would draw a square but some had the same colour, some had different colours on each side and some had different pen thickness. It all depended on the order of the blocks and where they were in respect to the repeat loop. This was a great activity and encouraged me to think hard and accurately understand the code I was reading. I know I need to do more work with my children on getting them to read code on paper and writing down what they think would be produced, rather than just give them code and get them to press play to see what happens. I am going to look into incorporating some Scratch Maths lessons into my Year 4, 5 and 6 coding curriculum next year. 

After a delicious lunch with my new ICT specialist buddies and Oli Howson (@ohowson), a lecturer of computing at The OU, I attended what only felt like a creative D.T. lesson; making circuits out of primarily cardboard and copper tape. This simple yet genius idea was run by Matt Moore (@AlwaysComputing) who showed us examples of mazes, arcades games and a guitar which were all made of cardboard and programmed using tools such as electrical tape, insulated paint, copper tape, LEDs and buzzers. We then set about making our own creations! I worked with Duncan Wakefield (@wakefielddunc), who probably did most of the hard work, and we managed to create a simple switch circuit that when connected, activated a small vibrator! (Note: Everyone in the room was far too mature to find this remotely amusing!!!) A photo of Cardi-B is shown below! Although I would love to introduce this into my curriculum, I think I would need more practice and confidence with creating these kinds of circuits before introducing it. It would more likely be introduced through an after school club rather than into a year group’s lessons.  

My penultimate session was a really good discussion of ideas led by Sway Grantham (@SwayGrantham) on how to assess ICT. We began by taking part in some polls to see how people currently assess and looked at people’s opinions on what type of assessments they thought were most important. (e.g. summative, formative etc…) We talked about the fact that there is not one solid answer to the question ‘How do you assess ICT?’, but the best way to answer is to share different ideas that will work for different areas of the curriculum. For example, it might be teacher observations, a multiple choice Kahoot quiz, a survey or using Diagnostic Questions. A technique that Sway uses is to use questions to create a score and then this is transferred through a python program to create a web grid. The nearer the child’s web is to the edge of the grid – the closer they are to achieving in that area. In each corner of the grid was a ‘Superhero’ computing area figure such as Code Captain, Net Ninja and Hardware Hero. I really liked this idea as it clearly showed the areas of computing that were a child’s strength and weakness. I will look into how I can incorporate this type of recording into my assessments.

My last session before the end was an activity suggestion for a code club. This was run by Cerys Lock (@RPi_Stuff) who showed us how to create a rainbow using python code onto a Sense HAT Emulator (a micro controller – a bit like a Microbit) Not sure if that is right, by the way – it was all very new to me and I had never coded in python before! With the help of Cerys, Michelle and Andy – I managed to just about get it done. We also programmed it so it would disappear if the humidity and temperature controls changed! Very cool stuff – however I think the closest that I’m going to get to working with python in my school is by using EduBlock (@edu_blocks) with my Year 6’s. I did enjoy the experience though!

We finally gathered together for closing words and had a reminder from Holly Billinghurst (@TeachAllAboutIT) for us all to take time to BREEEEEAAAAATHE and look after our well-being. I need to remember that sometimes it’s ok to say… NO!

I was buzzing all the way home to London after the conference. It was an absolute pleasure to present at Exabytes19 and I was rewarded with a day of fantastic CPD and had met some brilliant people. The only downside was that I couldn't attend every seminar!!! 

Thank you to Alan and his team for organising it and bring on Exabytes20!!!

James Fraser (@EatSleepICTRpt)