News Story

Young learners' innovative uses of technology

Rebecca Ferguson, Saturday 19 February 2011 | Annotate

For the third time running, Rebecca Ferguson has taken a team of young learners to the national finals of the Y-Factor competition. The conference is run as part of Learning Without Frontiers (formerly the Handheld Learning conference) and is open to children and young people who are making innovative uses of technology to support their learning. This year, members of a Robot Club that formed at Loughton School, where Rebecca is a governor, were successful in reaching the competition's national final. They explained to the judges how they had continued their club informally after leaving junior school, and had recently built a Rubik-cube-solving robot, with the help of instructions they had found on YouTube. Last year Rebecca accompanied a local team of ten-year-old Scratch programmers to the finals, and the year before she was there with a group of teenagers who had set up a history and archaeology group in SecondLife while working with Rebecca on The Open University's Schome project. This year the competition finalists presented their work in front of a large audience at the conference before being interviewed by the judges and being presented with a Nintendo DS each by The Gadget Show's Jason Bradbury. Rebecca's work in KMi includes EnquiryBlogger, a Paul-Hamlyn-funded project that helps young learners to collaborate with each other online.

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