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<p>Thanks so much Mike for the report. <br>
</p>
<p>No-shows at events like this are a common occurrence and in no
way reflect upon the efforts you and your team have made here.
Best wishes for expanding the IWS reach, and on a personal note,
thank you for showing our next generations that science is cool. <br>
</p>
<p>Kind regards, <br>
</p>
<p>Kathy<br>
</p>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/12/17 00:41, Mike Imelfort via
linux-aus wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CACjP9DNnJZCsJ3ROa3P=HQs48bzMn_x8WvWS5FFbvaO50B6Fsg@mail.gmail.com">
<div dir="ltr">
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"
id="gmail-docs-internal-guid-3fbb2bbe-365a-ff9a-7696-40a7f7c179e8"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">Hello everyone,</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">I’d like to report back to LA about the IWS Hackathon we held in the first week of November. The event was held a few weeks ago, but as we’re all so heavily involved in many activities within our children’s school (and one of us is a teacher there) we’ve not had the time to let you all know about how the weekend went. Well, school’s out in QLD today, so there are no more excuses. Let’s get started.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">-- What we set out to do</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">Our goal was to kickstart an open, freely available toolkit for the IWS that would include teacher instruction, connections to the Australian Curriculum, assessment and extension opportunities.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">We planned to have small teams of three or four teachers working together to create one or more lesson plans that use the IWS, include links to the Australian Curriculum and fit with a theme of work that students would typically work with throughout the year (e.g. the water cycle).</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">-- The event (what we did)</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">After a somewhat rocky start to the event (we had a higher than expected number of no shows) we managed to pull together a schedule that was really quite productive and fun. We changed from being a competition to being a workshop and we enlisted our remaining two judges who work in the STEM sphere to join in as participants.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">Our participants included representatives from 5 schools, including Tully State School in North Queensland, and a representative from Griffith University. As it was no longer a competition we decided to give away an IWS to each of the participating schools (We budgeted to give away eight, so we have enough $$ to give away three more).</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">We had two teachers map out an entire semester's worth of work around the IWS and two more develop lesson plans suitable for learning about and constructing individual components of the system. Clearly, there's still a lot of work left to do but we’ve had confirmation that one of the participants, a teacher from Mudgeeraba State School who planned a semester's worth of work got sign off from her peers and so we should expect to see a large influx of workable lesson plans come in from there.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">We're pleased with the outcome and we feel that getting 5 schools on board after our first event is a good effort.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">-- What we learned</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">Importantly, we need to understand why we had more no-shows than we expected. And we need to work out how to avoid that in the future. On a more positive note, we learned that teachers are interested in using the IWS for more applications that we had originally envisioned. One great example of this was a teacher who wants to teach straight up biology and use the IWS to enable students to accurately dose plants with fixed amounts of nutrients during temporal experiments. We had pretty much only been looking at the IWS from a very typical STEM perspective; coding, electronics, etc. so we were delighted to have this whole new realm of possibilities open up.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">We were not entirely sure how our attempts to hack together a hackathon would work, and I think now we have some proof that the concept has legs. We learned a lot about working in this space during the planning and over the weekend that we'll be sure to use as we prepare future events. We’d like to thank LA for their financial and other support.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:700;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">-- What’s next</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">We’re going to concentrate on finalising delivery of the IWS’s we’ve promised to give away in preparation for the next school year and thanks to LA we even have the resources to make a few more IWS’s which we hope to get into some more local and regional schools. We’re looking to organise at least two more similar events next year and we’re going to start planning for that after the Holiday break.</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">Once again, I’d like to thank LA for their support and I hope everyone has a safe holiday,</span></p>
<br>
<p dir="ltr"
style="line-height:1.38;margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt"><span style="font-size:11pt;font-family:Arial;color:rgb(0,0,0);background-color:transparent;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;text-decoration:none;vertical-align:baseline;white-space:pre">Mike and the IWS Hackathon team.</span></p>
</div>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
--
Kathy Reid
Independent digital consultant
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