Developing “Polymath Minds” with Tinkering Computational Thinking, and Robotics
Instructor
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Chryso ChristodoulouCEO - FounderMrs. Chryso Christodoulou is the founder of FUNecole® Research Institute and the co-founder of Digipro Education Limited. Her academic background is in Computer Science and Education. She is the designer and author of the FUNecole® for Cambridge ICT Starters Initial Steps endorsed by University of Cambridge International Examinations and recognized best practice educational approach by the European Commission. Mrs. Christodoulou is an external educational expert for the Institute of Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) on various educational research projects. She is a program committee member for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Computer society. Mrs. Christodoulou participates as keynote speaker and panelist at numerous conferences, seminars and workshops around the world. Mrs. Christodoulou´s work has been published in scholarly and policy publications, such as IEEE Xplore and the European Parliament Magazine. She is a recognized as an entrepreneurship expert by OECD and is one of 350 European Ambassadors of Entrepreneurship.
Recent Participants
The programme includes:
- Two full-days seminar at a luxurious venue.
- Half a day consulting session for each participating company.
- An extensive report for each participating company formulated to their needs. The report will include recommendations and suggestions for further consideration by the management.
- Full access to a seminar blog containing all presentations and further additional support materials and resources for each seminar participant.
- Full lunch and three coffee breaks for the two-days seminar for each seminar participant.
- No VAT is imposed to Digipro Executive Management Seminars. Please contact us for clarifications.
The University of Oxford forecasts that in the next 20 years 47% of jobs around the globe will become completely automated. This proliferation of Computers, Apps and Robotics contributes to the growing anxiety that machines and artificial intelligence will make workers obsolete in the future. Meanwhile, predictions on the number of devices that will be in use by 2020 as part of the Internet of Things range from 20 billion to 75 billion.
Schools and teachers from all disciplines need to teach students how to remodel the technological world around them and truly become creators and inventors of new ideas and solutions rather than consumers of technology. 21st-century teachers need to combine multiple disciplines, enhance learning and prepare students for diverse pathways that prepare them for unforeseen career paths.
21st-century classrooms need to become places of great joy, creativity, and collaboration. Schools need to actively enhance student participation by offering multidisciplinary learning experiences in order to create “polymaths”… These polymath, versatile, flexible, highly innovative, creative minds ought to be ready to change professions at least 3 times during their lifetime (Think Tank on Global Education, Harvard, 2016).
At the moment, national curricula are advocating that students need to be exposed to computer science, coding (“Learn to Code Before You Learn to Read”), computational thinking and robotics from kindergarten to 12th grade! Teacher communities and schools need to inspire students to imagine and take control of their own destiny with enthusiasm and confidence.
This seminar is aspirational, inspirational and practical, as it offers school leaders, educational consultants and curriculum coordinators values, tools and activities that enrich and accelerate the learning process and place the students in control of their own destiny.
This seminar will offer valuable insight to school principals/managers, educational curriculum consultants and master trainers of private High School and Lyceums, as well all other private educational Institutions approved by Ministry of Education and Culture. All schools need to transform and develop their educational practices further, integrating Computational Thinking, Tinkering and Robotics across all disciplines.
By the end of these seminar participants from all kinds of disciplines will be able to:
- Learn how to inspire students to develop powerful ideas, empower self-reflection, clarify their thinking and connect them to solve real-world problems
- Use computational thinking, programming languages and robotics in a broad and diverse range of disciplines
- Use creative coding through games and apps to prepare students for life and future careers
- Increase global competitiveness in science and technology innovation and improve the STEM-àSTREAMS understanding so as to adequately prepare students for STEM-related careers which are on the rise
- Understand the need of remixing and reusing theory as a powerful instruction methodology for enabling students to excel
- Review full demos of the latest state of the art resources, tools and curricula, such as ROBOTC® for MINDSTORMS, Raspberry Pi, and Hummingbird Robotics.
DAY One
07:00 – 07:30 / Arrival & Registration
07:30 – 08:00 / Introduction and Overview of the Seminar’s Objectives
08:00 – 09:30 / Connecting the Disconnected: Schools and the Increasingly Innovative World
- Innovation eliminates traditional-structured-routine jobs
- The global need for creative problem solvers
- How schools kill creativity
- Fostering and nurturing creativity
Empowered by Tinkering: Learning by Doing
Tinkering provides students opportunities to design, invent, innovate and create. As students tinker, they learn through playing, trying-out new ideas, exploring alternative paths, adjusting and imagining new possibilities. How do students really learn?
- Which computational and programming concepts should be introduced?
- What games and exercises enhance teaching concepts in fun, authentic and creative ways?
- How do programming ideas, programming languages and robotics support concrete ways of thinking?
09:30 – 09:45 / Coffee break with biscuits and snacks
09:45 – 11:45 / Introducing Key Programming Concepts to All Educators who are not computer specialists
- Introduction to the fundamentals of programming and computational thinking
- Boosting confidence in working with technology
- Use of computational thinking in broad range of disciplines
- Enhancement of student understanding through working on projects, both unplugged and on a computer, using the Scratch programming language
- Development of ideas for using object-oriented programming in the classroom
- Introduction to the “Internet of Things”
- Exploring how Arduino adventures foster creativity and collaboration.
Case study: Creative Coding Through Games and Apps
Present creative coding through games and apps. Present ways of preparing students for life and careers in the contemporary world. Students can be creative, learn best by doing, and get more socially engaged when they play. Games create an interactive and immersive learning experience focusing on solving real-world problems that are relevant to students’ lives.
11:45 – 12:30 / Lunch break at Hotel’s Restaurant
12:30 – 14:30 / Using Simple Electronics
- Develop knowledge of simple creative electronics
- Set up your Raspberry Pi and write your first program using block-structured programming language
- Develop a new generation of tools, activities, and spaces to support playful investigation and experimentation while integrating digital and physical materials
- Get involved in activities that enable student participation in new types of inquiry into light, sound, motion, and even storytelling
- Demonstrate “light play” examples where students can use program colored lights and moving objects to create dynamic patterns of shadows.
14:30 – 14:45 / Coffee break with biscuits and snacks
14:45 – 15:45 / Practical Group Work 1: Making It Happen
Moving from vision to reality by developing initiatives and strategies, teachers from all disciplines and levels can get involved, achieve learning goals and share individual experiences.
DAY Two
7:00 – 7:30 / Arrival
7:30 – 8:00 / Recapitulation of first day
8:00 – 09:30 / From Computational Thinking to Programming and Robotics
1. Learn to Code, Code to Learn.
- The benefits of using the algorithmic process for all disciplines. How students can use mathematical and computational ideas to enhance their understanding and to make connections across disciplines.
- How students can formulate strategies to solve problems, design projects, communicate ideas and collaborate.
- How students can reuse and remix coding projects and other kinds of projects (from Math, Science, Arts, Music) to innovate and excel. We will present how students use existing solutions to achieve much more complex outcomes than they could have done without technology.
2. Computational thinking.
- How computation thinking can be used not just for computer scientists but for everyone, regardless of age, background, interests or occupation.
Case study: “Remixing and Reusing” A Pathway for Learning.
The “Remixing” theory was tested using data from more than 2.4 million multimedia programming projects shared by more than 1 million users in the Scratch online community. First, we will see how users who remix more often have larger repertoires of programming commands. Then, we will see how exposure to computational thinking concepts through remixing facilitates the use of those concepts. These results support that young people learn through remixing, and have important implications for designers of social computing system.
We will address questions like: What is reasonable to borrow from others? How do we give appropriate credit to others? How do we assess cooperative and collaborative work?
“Remixing has been defined as the reworking and combination of existing creative artifacts, usually in the form of music, video, and other interactive media. The phenomenon is widespread, culturally significant, and controversial as it provokes important questions about ownership and authorship”.
09:30 – 09:45 / Coffee break with biscuits and snacks
09:45 – 11:45 / Robotics: The New Literacy and Powerful Learning Tool Across All Disciplines
Robotics is a great way to get students excited about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and to engage them in complex, strategic problem-solving. It introduces students to concepts and skills that are needed for understanding the intelligent, highly interactive information-based technology of the future.
- Introducing the STEM -> STREAMS approach with LEGO MINDSTORMS® Education Robotics in High Schools
- Using LEGO components, sensors, and NXT module concepts, such as gear ratios, friction, potential energy, kinetic energy, and oscillations
Case Study:
LEGO-based hands-on activities and how these can address high school standards on mechanic concepts, Science, Mathematics and Technology. Demonstration on how to enhance student creativity, logic, and problem-solving skills with the use of technology.
Introducing the Hummingbird Robots
- How Hummingbird Robots facilitate teaching and enhance creativity
- Using Hummingbird Robots to design models from the real world
- Programming with Scratch and Hummingbird Robots to engage children in all disciplines, such as Science, Languages, Arts, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics
14:00 – 14:15 / Lunch break at Hotel’s Restaurant
12:30 – 14:00 / Practical Work 2: Parallel workgroups by participants
Participants use their newly acquired knowledge and skills in order to crate school transformation action plans and work with web-enabled resources and tools to prepare own recourses and lesson plans.
14:00 – 14:15 / Coffee break with biscuits and snacks
14:15 – 15:45 / Participant Presentations
- Group presentations of sample recourses and lessons.
- Seminar evaluation.
- Conclusions.
The company visit will include a review of the individual plans prepared by the participants during the seminar and an in-depth presentation and brainstorming discussion. Specifically, this discussion will focus on:
- Devising comprehensive school strategies and action plans on how to enable all these transformations to take place in each school
- Implementing tinkering and computational thinking in line with the school strategy and priorities
- Using Robotics across all the curricula and disciplines
- Preparing communication and coordination plans for teachers
- Demonstrating how the new comprehensive approaches in STEM/STREAMS and student-centric practices can inspire students to become creators and owners of knowledge and skills.
After this session, Chryso Christodoulou will prepare a comprehensive report for every participating school institution with consultation on how the school can proceed further and beyond the scope of this seminar and into practical ways of implementing these strategies.
SUBSIDY, ATTENDANCE, AND CANCELLATION POLICY
HRDA Subsidy and Seminar Attendance
- A company’s participant is eligible for a subsidy when their Social Insurance and Industrial Training contributions have been settled in full by the time of registration/seminar. In case of ineligibility/disqualification, the company will be invoiced the full amount per participant.
- A company’s participant is eligible for a subsidy if he/she completes an obligatory attendance of 75% or more (both during seminar and company visit). In case of failure to complete the attendance, the company will be invoiced the full amount, per participant.
Cancellation and Substitution Policy
- Cancellations can be accepted up to 5 working days prior to the seminar without penalties. For any cancellations received after the deadline (or no-shows), the company will be invoiced the full amount per participant.
- Substitutions can be accepted any time prior to the seminar without penalties.
- Τhroughout the seminar participants must have their camera and microphone open, for better communication and as defined by the specifications of HRDA otherwise participants will not be approved by HRDA.