matthewvenn's blog

The wind turbines project has been going really well. Every time I run the workshop I get it that bit closer to my idea of a ‘perfect' workshop; fun, creative, experiential, a great learning environment. I'm getting better at coaching the children through the process and really encouraging the learning through failure attitude.

The UK ‘SAUCE’ (Schools at University for Climate and Energy) programme is based in London Metropolitan University’s Department of Applied Social Sciences (DASS) and was designed to develop education in climate awareness, offer smart energy choices for 10 to 13 year olds, and promote the adoption of similar programmes in schools across Europe.I'm running a wind turbine workshop where young people will get to design and test wind turbine blades in a custom built wind tunnel.One reason why I'm excited is because we've been working on a fantastic wind tunnel for testing the blades.  The wind tunnel is linked to a computer so we can record the best scores in terms of power generated. You can see the photos of our wind tunnel development here.We'll be applying learning-to-learn philosophy, and especially encouraging young people to see how much better they can make blades by trying more than one design.

The learning through games session went very well.

Participants enjoyed themselves and gave some good feedback on what they had learnt in the session as well as ways to improve it in the future.

Some of the games invented in the session are going on to be used in the participants own work - what a great result!

And here is an interesting artifact from the event. Everyone had 9 stickers to distribute as they thought fit. The results show what people thought were important values for learning or for playing games. It suggests that challenge, fun and engagement are key areas to address when creating games for learning.

I've also added another resource for this session.

Some internet resources for the Sadler Heath games workshop:

• The fun fed - a collective that plays fun games for adults,
• My list of games - my list of games that I've found or invented,
• Cheapass games - a company that sells the rules to games with no pieces,
• The fun theory - changing people's behaviour through games.

This month at Arcola's excellent Green Sunday event, I'll be running the moodlamp workshop - this fits in well with this months theme: technology and design.More info about the other activities here.

I'm happy to be facilitating the next session at Sadler Heath.

Sadler Heath is an organisation established for those of us who want to take responsibility for their own long-term personal development and thought leadership by working together with like-minded people in a safe and supportive environment.

This workshop will be about using games for learning:

• games are a powerful tool for learning,  as playing a game creates a great learning environment,
• the mindset that people have when they play a game is consistent with learning; engaged, open, looking for connections, enjoying themselves,
• the rules and object of the game can link with the learning material,
• games involve multiple senses and patterns of thinking, and so involve different types of learners,
• games are a great ice breaker and allow experiential understanding of the topic in discussion,
• games have an element of ambiguity, and so enable different people to learn
• different things.

Workshop structure:

• we will get curious about games, finding out how and why they work as learning tool,
• we will use this knowledge to practice facilitating games,
• we will move on to create our own games that support an idea.

I'm pleased and excited to get the go ahead for a new music project in Peckham! We're working with Southwark veterans COVO and performer/teacher Sam Alty.

The music project will first run for 12 weeks; working to build trust, rapport and musical skills. The project will conclude by producing a finished track. You can download the project proposal here: hip hop project

Sam Alty is a professional musician and performer based in South London. He teaches improvisation and guitar.

COVO is an educational charity based in Southwark since 1999. COVO provides tailor-made projects, training and consultancy that support schools and organisations to address conflict, disaffection and underachievement in education and the workplace.

One of the problems we've faced in doing graffiti workshops for young people is the fumes and the mess. Now we have a great new tool to help in our workshops: the virtual graffiti machine!

Young people can practice indoors and get to grips with the general concepts and ideas of graffiti before going outside and painting.

The instructions to make your own virtual graffiti system are published and are freely available on the instructables website.

Case study coming soon, but for now here is the edited video feedback from the workshops at St. Martins.

We started our last session with a fun variation on a name game, before discussing last week's homework question: “Where would better communications be useful in your life?” This shed some light on some communications in school that could be improved.

The main point I wanted to cover in this session was how important it is for the listener to check their understanding of a communication. This simple skill prevents many common communication issues from arising.

We played a version of the ‘broken telephone game', where people whispered the message around the circle and we see how close they are to the original transmission at the end. We then played it again but this time the listeners related back to the whisperers what they had heard.

Next we moved on to play a variation on a game from last week, where we role-played various scenarios to practice communication. The key point was to cleanly and fully summarise your partner's communication.

This marked the end of the workshop topics, and we spent the remaining 20 minutes doing feedback; questionnaires, the mindset dot feedback from the first workshop, and a few people recorded some video clips as well.

We're just starting to look at the results of the feedback, but some of it is very promising. Here is a composite photo of the mindset feedback that we ran before the first workshop and after the last. It shows people's beliefs in their ability to change various aspects about themselves. After the last workshop people showed a marked increase in their beliefs about being able to change!