YENE personal economics

Jointly delivered a Young Enterprise workshop on personal economics to Year 9 at the Billingham Campus School. This was really useful in gauging the level of financial knowledge of Young people in the region, especially useful consider our work with Young Finance Manager.

Enterprise Week 2008

Been busy this enterprise week.

Started of being a regional judge for the Make Your Mark Challenge. The Challenge set to schools across the UK was to conceive an enterprise based upon the Olympic values. There were some excellent entries, some businesses which I would have considered myself. We spent the day shortlisting the best entries from across the region for final judging in the North East final. It was great being offered this opportunity and it was an interesting test of my own business assessment skills.

My second activity for Enterprise weak was a motivation talk at Hartlepool Sixth Form collage. The talk was to the business studies students at the school and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I kept the session very casual and  was very open with the performance of the business. It was really appreciated and an initially quite crowd ended up quite lively and inquisitive.

I finished the week off by taking part in the celebration of enterprise, jointly organised by Make Your Mark, Young Enterprise and A4E. A fun activity day at the Riverside stadium in the spirit of the Crystal Maze -  a great way to end the action of enterprise week.

Teacher Training – Games in the Classroom

Delivered a workshop to a class of teachers in training, on how they can incorporate gaming in the classroom.

I set out to demonstrate a variety of approaches which, could be used in order to reap the benefits of gaming in the classroom. This started with an introduction into bespoke development, like the services we other at Ideonic to how COTS (commercial of the shelf) games could be used for educational purposes; this included an activity to develop communication skills using a Wii and a blindfold – a great success.

We then looked at how freely available social media could be used to create games, which they could then use in the classroom. This was in the from of an ARG (alternate reality game) I devised called ‘Sophie Carroll’ (visit the starting point at sophiecarroll.wordpress.com ) - this worked extremely well and sparked many ideas for its application to different areas of learning.

Finally we did some brain storming (using computer game characters as an seed) to find solutions for the challenges of getting gaming into the classroom.