Bett was held at the Custom House in London Excel this year and was a veritable feast of the great and the good. With over 35,000 attendees expected I spoke to people from many parts of the world. The DLR was so overloaded with people attending that at one point the service was stopped at Canning Station and everyone had to walk to Custom House.
With all the news coverage about how vital it is for teenage students to learn how to code, I was surprised by the lack of relevant coding platforms at Bett 2013. This year the show seemed to be very well patronised by data and analytics – gathering data, measuring data and reporting on data. Whilst that is all good and well, how are teenagers going to learn to code? The app market continues to prosper, students are tech savvy, have increasingly sophisticated technology in their pockets and the importance of knowing how to code has never been greater.
It must surely be both a challenging and rewarding time to be a teacher. Today old school meets new school in the classroom and the potential for amazing results is just waiting to happen. All that is needed is some creative thinking from the top down as well as the bottom up and the ability to let go of the past and embrace the new.
Stephen Heppell, was inspirational with his approach to new ways of learning. Stephen’s approach is to teach students how to learn then trust them to determine what works best for them in terms of classroom environment and use of technology. It was great to see the ease with which lots of youngsters used Scratch on his stand at Bett. Coding is close to Stephens’s heart and when LiveCode’s ancestor, HyperCard, came to market in the late 80’s Stephen created a HyperCard stack with which it was launched. Stephen is a breath of fresh air in the Digital World of learning and his approach has a proven track record of success.
Dell had a Formula 1 racing car on their stand sitting next to a racing simulator which was hugely
popular. The new Windows 8 Dell Tablet is ideal for using apps build on LiveCode by students and many students and teachers who tried it out for themselves, thought so too.
Everyone fell in love with the very human Nao Android Robot it will be interesting to watch how this evolves to be used as a teaching tool. The Active Robots folk were keen to try out LiveCode to see if it could drive the Nao so watch this space it may just happen
Looking forward to Bett 2014!
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