Windlesham House 2


One good thing about teaching at Windlesham House School was that there was a certain amount of creative freedom for teachers to try out new and unusual educational ideas. When the first computers started to arrive in schools, I suppose it was inevitable that they were usually given to the Maths department. Well, if you think that a computer is just a glorified electronic calculator, then this was more or less bound to happen, but it was also a big mistake. It meant that many Art, Music and English teachers felt a bit left out of the I.T. world and there was the impression that computers are really just mathematical devices that have nothing to do with anything vaguely arty or creative. At Perrott Hill, some BBC “B” computers arrived soon after I did and, sure enough, the head of Maths, dear old Paddy Logan, was put in charge of them.


At Windlesham House School, computers were much more in evidence. Maybe WHS was a bit too “trendy”, so any new scholastic fad was going to be popular, as it proved how up-to-date and progressive the school really was. Craft, Design and Technology was the educational flavour of the month, although there were those cynics who claimed that CDT stood for “Can’t Draw for Toffee”.


It was while I was at Windlesham that I became deeply interested in two aspects of Information Technology, in an educational context: robots and desktop publishing. At one point, I even thought seriously about going back to La Sainte Union and doing an M. Sc. to do with computers and education.


At WHS, I ran a robot-building club with a small group of boys. (Alas, none of the girls seemed to be interested.) We started off with Fischertechnik (FT) and later we moved on to Lego Technic. The FT is (or was) more advanced and allowed my enthusiastic young robot builders to construct more varied and challenging robots.


In case you did not know, most kit-built robots consist of four main elements: the actual robot (electric motors, sensors and the structural components), the interface (an electrical box of tricks), a power source for the robot and the computer. Building robots from re-usable kits is fun and quite challenging. Once you have built your robot, you have what can often be the difficult task of programming and controlling it from your computer.


You learn quite a lot just from following the diagrams and instructions, but then you can refine what you have made, adding extra bells and whistles. After you have built a few robots, you can the start to design, build and program your own robotic creations.
 

Mostly we built a variety of robot arms, as well as a few cars, a walking man and a rather clever thing that was a bit like a flatbed scanner and it could draw simple pictures.


As well as building robots with the boys and taking lots of photos, I also started writing articles about how to use computers in schools. MAPE (Micros in Primary Education) published quite a few of my pieces and I also managed to get a couple into Junior Education. Not bad for an English teacher with no training or background in Information Technology!


Here are a few more (rather random) photos of my Robot Club at Windlesham.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Whale of a Trip

Image
No, it's not migrants arriving in Italy   We decided that we wanted to go on the Whale Shark Tour. We have done several other tours in the Philippines and really this was the only one we had not done. The hotel told us that we had to get up at 5.30am, which we were not too keen about, and they said that the trip would cost us 1,200 pesos each. They also told us that we would probably back at the Bee Farm by 2 or maybe 3pm. Well, we duly got up at the right time and took a tuktuk, one of those three-wheelers that does a passable impression of a WW2 Bren Gun carrier.   We soon arrived at Alona Beach, on another part of Panglau island, where the Whale Shark trip was supposed to start. A couple of Filipinos paddled us out to the ship in what looked like a plastic box. More than two hours later, we were still at Alona Beach, waiting for the trip to start! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum, me hearties! Waiting for our turn to see the whale shark s We finally l...
Read more

Educaring, 2

Image
Not so long ago, I wrote a post for my blog called Educaring . Please do not misunderstand me. I really do believe that teachers, youth workers, parents (and indeed anyone involved with young people) all have a duty to protect children and teenagers, to keep them safe. As I argued in my previous posting, I also believe that the task of protecting children is becoming more and more difficult - almost impossible, in fact. Yes, the Internet has a lot to do with it, I am sure, but there is another problem that is hardly ever discussed.  In a nutshell, anyone who genuinely cares about children finds it very hard to imagine how evil and how subtle child molesters and pedophiles really are. I think that is probably why many teachers and parents just do not know when a pedophile is "grooming" a child and why they often do not believe it, even when confronted with the unpleasant truth. Michael Green at Windlesham House School I knew Michael Green when I was teaching at Windlesh...
Read more

On the Cards, Part 1

Image
Getting our new Bulgarian residency cards from the Microwave Oven Woman Rejoice! Let's celebrate. Hallelujah! At long last, the Microwave Woman has given us our new Bulgarian residency cards (BRCs). As a special treat, just in case you do not know what a BRC looks like, here is my old one.  My dear wife suggested that I should "black out" certain bits, as there are lots of evil people out there on the Internet, all gathering my personal and financial details in order to swindle me or involve me in some dreadful scandal or some such nonsense. Of course, no one who reads my blog could ever do such a nasty thing!   Getting our new BRCs means that we can go ahead with our applications for our Russian visas. Then, maybe two or three weeks later, our passports will be returned to us, with new Russian visas stuck into them. The other good news is that the insurance agent in Dragoman did not lose my car registration document. When she had finished giving me my new car ...
Read more