hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2157.txt

Episode: 2157
Title: HPR2157: BarCamp Manchester part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2157/hpr2157.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:02:34

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Hello this is Tony Hughes for Hacker Public Radio, I'm still at Bar Camp Manchester
and I've got Alan O'Donney here with me and he's going to explain a little bit about a talk he's just done.
Hi Tony, well I've actually just done two talks so one was on Flip Learning and the other one was on Girls in STEM.
The first one was Girls in STEM was a kind of story about an event we ran up in Newcastle to inspire and engage girls into STEM related subjects
and STEM is used to describe science technology engineering and maths and some people have observed that those particular careers and courses don't are not very diverse in terms of their intake.
I described an event that we ran where we used Minecraft as a tool to encourage the girls in groups to envisage or imagine a future in where they've made some amazing contribution to science technology maths
like they might have made a discovery or built something or solved a problem face in the world and how their local community might 50 or 60 years later build a monument in memory of this achievement
and the girls built it in Minecraft and then used Python and the Minecraft API on a Raspberry Pi to code a fly through so that the user when they went to view the monument to think they built in Minecraft it would teleport the user through the different key viewing points.
And the second talk I've just given was all about Flip Learning so Flip Learning is kind of the opposite model to the chalk and torque style of teaching where some people describe being in university lecturers where there's this university lecturer talking about some aspect of computer science
and basically just have to sit there and like passengers watch the talk that's chalk and torque.
In the way I've described it that's correct whereas Flip Learning is more about you provide the students with all of their content and resources that they need to understand the topic they go away
they use those resources at their own pace and time of choosing to grasp and develop a better understanding of the topic then they return back to the classroom say the following lesson and then the teachers and assesses their understanding
and if it turns out that there's certain gaps in the students understanding the teacher can then try to fill in or plug some of those gaps or debunk some of those myths that have arisen
and it means the teaching is a lot more responsive as well as being interactive so that was the second talk and I've got a third one planned for later and I've been really greedy in terms of my bar camp talks.
For the listeners who don't know you Alan do you want to say a little bit about yourself and just say how you got into this kind of work?
So I have spent 24 years teaching and working in mainstream schools, secondary school and technology mostly in the north of England and the last five or six years I've been on a journey where I didn't know what computer science was started teaching it
and I made loads of mistakes and of what I've done and I've documented those and I've found some things that worked really well and I've shared those with colleagues and friends and I've also worked a lot in things outside of the classroom so things like raspberry jam, hack to the future
and now I've recently with the company I work for now we've set up the XF Foundation which is a not-for-profit organisation to inspire digital makers, support the teaching of computing in school and promote safe, secure and appropriate use of technology.
That sounds really cool and I've known you for a few years now Alan and I know you're quite heavily involved in the community, the tech community etc in the northwest area of the UK.
Do you want to say a little bit about some of the events you've been involved in in the last few years?
Well it actually started for me by coming to an event like the one we're at today so the very first event I came to like this, it was kind of special, that's where I met you for the first time Tony and Les and Dan Lynch and Ian Forester and all these people are part of this kind of northwestern community of bar campers
and it was a U-Cube event at Madlab in Manchester about six years ago and that was around about that time where I was wrestling with this, I was teaching IT at that time and it didn't really felt a bit shallow, I didn't feel like I was doing the best that I possibly could and my eyes were opened when I came to that U-Cube event because I'd heard about open source distributions like Linux and Ubuntu but I'd never at that point had the courage or the...
to be able to get reduced to fear enough to try and use those in my classroom and I found by coming to events like that, meeting people like yourself who are so willing to share and encourage and inspire others, that really opened my eyes and in fact at that first event, that was the first time I'd ever heard of Mint OS because you'd brought along some, probably at that point there were maybe about 15-year-old laptops that were running, trying to run Windows XP but it would take about five hours before you could actually even log in and you just showed me how.
You can install Mint OS on those and they were booting up within seconds. Years later I then went and installed Mint OS in my classroom and there I was just a few years later to the help of yourself and layers and the others that go to these events, actually using Linux in my classroom.
So the community has had a massive influence on the things I've done and I feel a little bit guilty sometimes because people say, Alan, all this stuff here is great, well all I've done really is I've seen ideas from these kind of events and I've tried to think, can I use that in school? How would that work? Things like coding dojos and moodle and MOOCs?
So thank you Tony and Les and Dan Lynch and Ian Forrester and all those other people who have put those events on that I've been able to come along and reap the benefits from.
The strange thing is when I first met you, it's not that long since I started using Linux. I only started using Linux around about 2008 and full time in 2009 and it's through community events like this that we all learned don't we?
And then we can pass that knowledge on to other new people coming into it.
The thing that really appealed to me was the fact that I could no longer see any barriers because I've been to some kind of events before, not necessarily with technology where you say, oh that looks really cool.
Yeah, yeah, it is. It costs me £4,000 or but look at this thing I've built here. This only cost me £3,000 but the thing I found by coming to these events was people saying these are tools that are free.
I'm happy to give this away and people were so generous and had very, that's a big jenga pile that just collapsed behind me.
People are so willing to give things away without expecting very much back in return and that's why I'm really I feel proud to be associated with this community.
And it's then inspired me to try and give away as much as possible of the things I've worked on.
Oh well that's really interesting and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. Do you just want to give the listeners some idea of where they can find you or information about what you do?
So if you want to contact me personally, my name is Alan O'Donohoe. It's a bit of a mouthful and it's even harder to spell my surname.
But I'm techno teacher on Twitter. It's T-E-K-N-O-Teacher.
But the thing I'm proudest of at the moment is the work we're doing with exa foundation, which is exa.foundation.
People say, well what's the rest of the URL? Is it co-U-K or no, that's it. It's exa.foundation.exa.foundation.
Thank you.
We'll put some of those links in the show notes. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Tony.
Thank you.
We'll treat you very well.
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