learning together logo professor stephen heppell, heppell.net
...on our Central Feature stand at the wonderful annual BETT Show in London's Excel
With great thanks to our sponsoring partners: Netgear and i2ieventsgroup

At this year's BETT Show we had a lot happening - all built around the theme of Learning Together and it was a wonderful experiences - we learnt a lot and so did everyone involved. This is a set of information about the whole stand and the many activities on it, over the four days. We produced an even shorter pdf note for the students to give them an idea of what to expect.

This year, we invited respected journalist Richard Doughty to narrate our stand and curate our memories and he did just that.

Students this year were from Lampton School in West London's Hounslow, Kings Road Primary in Chelmsford, CEMP in Bournemouth University, SEK Ciudalcampo, & SEK El Castillo, both in Madrid. We briefed everyone together ready to Learn Together for four days. It was truly a joy to see them all learning together. So what did we do over the four days:

Maths Swapfest Corner
We had a corner full of very old maths "technology": slide rules, circular slide rules, a comptometer, an abacus, a reverse polish Sinclair calculator, a giant calculator... our students would pounce on a passing "older" person and ask if they could explain the workings on a calculator that had no = key, or a Comptometer that did farthings - and in exchange would teach their guest about Japanese maths, or Ethiopian maths or various maths tricks. A particular puzzle was this Ukrainian pocket slide-rule:

The sight if this intergenerational maths swapfest was pretty encouraging. A maths teacher visiting, who had been dragooned into helping expalin an abacus, said the mixed age conversation was the best thing he'd seen in a decade. This corner of the stand was consistently packed and our students really enjoyed having tricks and methods to teach our BETT visitors. Yo can find more about other people's maths from here, and no doubt other places too.

The picture shows a particularly nice moment - governors of Russian Provinces were touring with their translator. As they reached this corner of the stand one of our 10 year olds, Deniss, joined in with their Russian discussion fluently. He was also a Russian speaker. Nice moment for global learning and one repeated when the Pakistan education minister came for a chat.

click to enlarge / supplement any image

3rd millennium seating
For a long time it has been clear to me and to Juliette that the FF&E (furniture, fittings and equipment) in a school is often more important than the building, especially if the buiding already has some agility. And some interesting education-specific bits of furniture have appeared - like the tiered seating that is wonderfully effective in so many schools today.

But it seemed to us both, and to pal James Clarke of Intuition Furniture, that a design was needed that was properly agile and also recognised the children's abilty post-phones to write on large surfaces and record their work by camera. And that allowed standing work, collaborative work, tiered class seating and much more.

On the stand we were showing the prototype of this furniture - and we were all rather pleased with it - the children showed us many ways that it could be configured very simply, and all our guests enjoyed sitting up on the top tier and writing down at table level, on the table... and more.

Lost more detail about the project - and about Intuition the excellent furniture folk who build the prototypes - from here.

iPad radio station
Last year at BETT 2012 we had the wonderful Russell Prue from Anderton Tiger on our central feature stand, with his very pro schools' radio kit.

This year, in keeping with the Learning Together theme, our students ran the radio station (see www.heppell.net/radio) - the activity was ably lead by veteran student of past BETTs, Georgia.

We used a Behringer Xenyx X1622USB mixer deck, linked into an iPad. We had a few technical issues - the USB on the mixer didn't talk to the iPad, nothing would talk to an iPad mini (at time of writing the audio is apparently only partially implemented - naughty Apple) and we streamed it to Podcast Producer on an Apple server because we had that, but in truth something like AudioBoo would be better.

We used an iRig Pre preamp to feed in the input to the IoS iPad. In truth there are many ways to do this, including a proper radio station, but the ability to broadcast / podcast in real time from just about anywhere is now as given (and ubiquitous) as the ability to take and share pictures. Good microphones, properly set up remain the key to good audio. We used Sennheiser mikes for their quality.

The students doing our interviews had a laminated crib sheet that you can read here. They already had a very acute sense of the grammar, pace and timbre of radio. Our interviewers were from 9 years old to 16.

Pi in the sky
Last year we had our stand students programming from (and with) Scratch and we did this again for 2013 but more intensively and with a lot more ambition. The activity was led by PhD student Tom Stacey (who is looking at, if school students are back into programming, as they are hurrah, then what might the pre school very early years do to cue them up for a world of algorithms and routines?). With Tom were folk from the Chelmsford Maker Space community so we had PhD, NEETs, Secondary & Primary students, all learning together.

So what did they do? Well, lots as it happens: they used Javascript to programme some little cheap bluetooth cars - investigating the consequence of the various variable values first to work out what the cars cound do. The used MIT's visual programming language Scratch with their Raspberry Pis and connected them through the wonderful (if slightly delicate) MakeyMakey boards to build a game with a four banana games controller:

and of course they all then got a lt more ambitious and tried to hack in to the variable values for a Parrot AR Drone and to see if, just because they could, it might be possible to fly it with the same Pi and Makey combination. Which of course they did.

There is a debate running, since the impact of Ian Livingstone's rather good Next Gen paper for NESTA brought computing back into the curriculum (hurrah) about teacher support for professional development - with the usual providers lining up to posit a deficiency model and to sell courses. But what we see on our BETT stands and of course throughout the year too, over and over, is that the mixed age, cross institutional pollination of ideas moves the students forward SO fast - with teachers retaining a role as learning professionals to validate, celebrate, acknowledge differentiated tasks, praise, narrate and more; these are things teachers can already do very well, without more CPD. The development resource IS the student community with its shared internal expertise. User Led learning. We saw so clearly at BETT this year, again, that Learning Together really does work, and also is über affordable.

GPS tracing
Led by another BETTeran, Harry, formerly from Lampton School, students were faced with the task of tracing geometric shapes onto the land around BETT using a GPS trace - the simple idea being that they walked the shaped and checked the trace after to see how they did: maths skills, map skills, teamwork, etc etc.

BETT in Excel has some challenges - the metal clad roof is fairly GPS proof (!) so Harry had to be inventive and investigative before he could get everyone on task. He tried everything from a dedicated GPS monitor (for locating pets) to various iPhone / Andoid apps. Curiously, the best was a skiing app (also on Android) - probably because it needed no www for a map download. As you see from the triangle here, even straight lines were a bit wobby - click the image to see a more complex image (in AUS) but traced with less buildings to mess up the signal.

Again, the interesting thing was simply leaving our mixed age learners to sort it out - and we learnt from the very thorough investigations they made, and reported back on. Learning Together - works.

How IT all works
With the help of our stand sponsor pals at Netgear, and their interactive writeable wall of equipment, our stand students were, in mixed age shifts, explaining to anyone who would listen (and there were plenty who were interested) just how the WWW and indeed the Internet beneath it, all work - they used things like TraceRoute to illustrate their understanding. For something as pervasive and ubiquitous as IP and urls, it is surprising that this is not central to a science curriculum. Again, a CPD debate runs about how many teachers can understand this enough to teach it (actually, a lot in my view) but again the answer to quieten the doubters was to see how effective a mix of student curiosity and industry expertise, with leanring professionals alongside, could be.

Write on surfaces
Lots to say about this - but read the pdf leaflet we made available on the stand. Probably the short version is that children carrying phones with cameras in have opened up the whole opportunity to write on surfaces with all that offers in terms of audience, peer review, teacher feedback and more - but crucially they can capture images of their work and save them with one of the phones in the classroom (see www.cloudlearn.net for phones-in-class tested and tried protocols) - you can see the phones-out in this picture:

Binary fun
There are, as they say on witty T shirts, 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who do not.

Our stand students all fell into the first category and we had little moments of binary fun running throughout the four days. Our 0 and 1 shirts really worked, although maybe numbers on front would have been even better on reflection (no pun intended). We really did have a lot of maths fun going on and it all felt a long way from worksheets.

22 children standing in a row....?

Skyping all round the world
As in previous years we Skyped daily to schools and projects we are impressed / astonished by each day.

We love the way students elsewhere cope with the hurly burly (and frankly chaos) of a live conversation on a bustling stand at the heart of the world's largest show of its type. And we loved the way our students interrogate them, and learn from them. learning together. There were way too many to feature everyone, so here is one indicative example:

A crowd gathered always for Janet Antilla's wonderful students in Michigan with their frisbee-picking-up, frisbee-throwing (!) robot - an even tougher challenge than last year's basketball hoop scoring robot! If you missed their input, click on the image here to see their work in progress with the frisbee throwing... As many have said elsewhere, they apparently didn't think it's difficult cos nobody had told them it was difficult...

So, that was our busy busy stand for 2013. Learning Together was fun, absorbing, encouraging, persuasive and more. In straightened times of tight budgets and and shrinking reources it helped show that stage not age, peer to peer support, the young students chasing the role model of older students, the older students gaining responsibility and clarification of their own undersstanding through supporting the younger ones... all adds up to a model of effective learning without the usual cap on ambition that age phase brings. And the teachers really enjoyed watching it all happen through their professional eyes.

Big thanks to the schools, the teachers, the students, the sponsors (Netgear were as fab as their hardware, great partners), to Intuition for the wonderful furniture, i2ieventsgroup for letting us be there in the first place and the many many (many!) of you who came, learned, shared, chatted and brought tales of the changes you'd made in your learning since last year.

What's not to like?!

See you all again next year...

BETT: Learning Together

this page last updated Tuesday, April 30, 2013 6:41 PM by Prof Stephen Heppell

this page last udated April 30, 2013