Permission to Play

On Tuesday I attended the uLearn Permission to Play conference.  I was really excited about the opportunity to "explore how playful-learning leads to deeper learning for students".  Given my interest in Makerspaces in the library I chose to attend Mark Osborne's workshop on The Maker Movement in Schools and Tara Fagan's workshop on Future of Learning: Programming, robotics and missions of code.  An Ignite opening was first up with Jane Gilbert and Tim Carr.

I took all my notes via tweets so here they are:

It was great to have an opportunity to play with a variety of electronics, robotics and maker materials.  One thing that struck me was that, without a purpose, after working out what everything did I lost interest.  While it is important to give our students the opportunity to be creative and innovative, for some of them, like me, they will need a reason, a challenge or an objective in order to take the learning to the next step.

I have a wishlist to take back to school now and am starting to formulate a plan for a Makerspace.  I also bought myself an mBot, for research purposes!