Reflections on Tiles for Tales @ Mozfest
What. A. Weekend. I think we’ve all just about recovered — I don’t think many of us knew something could be so exhausting yet so energising and rewarding at the same time!
We — that is, Margaret Low and family and the Warwick Technology Volunteers project leaders — ran our Tiles for Tales workshop on the Saturday at Mozfest. If you’d like to see more about the project and the ideas behind the workshop, have a look at our previous post by Margaret here.
It was delightful seeing so many people turn up at our workshop. Despite a few “minor” technical hitches (it turns out that Raspberry Pis don’t like Ravensbourne Wi-Fi!) we got everything up and running and some of the tiles that people made were absolutely stunning. In retrospect, we could even say that we got to give our attendees an impromptu masterclass in debugging and problem solving!
Mozfest was an amazing environment in which to trial our workshop. This was the first time we’d used our tiles with children and being thrown in at the deep end allowed us to get a feel for what works well and what could be improved. We’ve learnt a lot and now have some reflection to do — in particular, about how we can best communicate what we’re trying to achieve and how best to then facilitate that.
It would be remiss of me to end this entry without paying tribute to some of the fantastic people we met over the weekend and to the atmosphere of the event itself. Mozfest is such a dynamic environment full of people doing such brilliant things and I don’t think the fellow project leaders and I were quite prepared for it; one of the first people we heard from was a 12-year-old boy who casually announced that he’d been working on a Python interface for Scratch. Also lovely was seeing some familiar faces from our CoderDojo back in Coventry — just goes to show it’s a small world after all!
Also, a massive thank you to everybody who lent their tiles to our Science Fair demo; the tiles looked great all put together! We hope you have taken them home with you and are enjoying experimenting with them. Shout out to Grace, who kept us company over the weekend and whose tile will be making on appearance on her and son’s blog as an avatar.
So, that’s it from us (hopefully until next year!). In the meantime, we’ll be working on developing Tiles for Tales and sharing it with our community and continuing our other volunteering projects. THANK YOU MOZFEST!