In order to expand my Programming abilities I took part in a week long Adobe certified training programme for Adobe Flex. Adobe Flex is a great alternative for programmers currently developing RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) in Flash, combined with AIR (Adobe Integrated Run-time) for desktop distribution, it presents many exciting opportunities and a useful addition to my skill-set.

Following three days of creative idea generation at the 4ip Crossover Labs, I took part in a further 2 day residential run by Creative Partnerships. Like the Crossover Labs, the workshop titled ‘intuition’ brought together professionals from a diverse range of backgrounds; however this time the group was balanced between teachers and creative practitioners such as animators, musicians, performers and dancers.

Intuition was lead by Gordon Poad a creative facilitator with a background in theatrical performance. The labs took a very different approach from the crossover labs; they were more about exploring creativity through various forms of art such as dance and drama.

The experience was really insightful for me. I gained an insight into the approaches taken by other practitioners and also primary and secondary school teachers. The delivery was excellent and I left with some excellent ideas for facilitating my own workshops in the future.

On the 2nd-4th of March I took part in the Channel 4 and Northern Film & Media, 4ip Crossover Labs. The labs were directed by Frank Boyd an expert in encouraging creativity in the media industry.

The labs were designed to bring together the best minds from the media industry. They focusedon creating new ideas by bringing together varied perspectives and facilitating the blending of ideas through a range of creative activities. A great emphasis was placed on user experience design and understanding the mind of the end user; additionally, we used various seeding techniques in order to create different routes to idea conception.

An excellent three days which improved not only my own creativity but also gave me some great insights into expert facilitation and workshop delivery.

I have been taking part in a 3 day training programme organised by Creative Partnerships to bring together creative practitioners and teachers in order to conceive innovative ways of getting creativity into the classroom. This has involved a large  variety of creative practicals, including dancing, artistic drama and tours of medieval churches.

Some interesting perspectives have been presented on how creativity can be fostered and some excellent definitions of what creativity is in the first place.

1. Creativity is knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do
2. C = O * F (creativity equals opportunity * functionality)

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.

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.

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.

Was commissioned by Isis Arts to deliver a two day (1-2-1) training course to one of the New Media trainers.

An excellent opportunity to share my knowledge of Actionscript but also a great opportunity for me to refresh my own skills, by making sure I understood why I program the way that I do.

The training programme recieved positive feedback and I look forward to the next teaching opportunity.

My Entrepreneurial profile has been posted on the IfWeCanYouCan website, an inititive to help incourage entrepreneurship in the North East.

http://www.ifwecanyoucan.co.uk/entrepreneurs/jeremiah-alexander

Welcome to the professional website of Jeremiah Lazarus Alexander, Serious Games Developer, Digital Entrepreneur and Owner/Director of Ideonic Limited.

I aim to use this website as a professional CV. Visit this website to track my professional development and entrepreneurial endeavours.