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An outline agenda for C12

The Scifest meeting should give us plenty of informal opportunities to discuss and reflect on the broader agenda for CONSTRUIT!. One of the best features of SciFest last year was the discussion that it provoked about the status of the resources for making construals, the responses of our visitors and the strategies we should deploy going forward. There has been considerable progress in understanding the CONSTRUIT! agenda in all these respects in the course of the year. We have learnt a great deal about what resources might be realistic for the schools education context, transformed the environment for making construals, and have begun to consolidate on some of illustrative examples. We hope that this year's visit to Scifest will be significantly enhanced through the participation of students who attended C6 (including Juraj Karlubik from Comenius and a number of Finnish students working with Tapani Toivonen). It would be valuable if possible to recruit one or two of the school teachers and pupils who we met up with at Scifest 2015 to join in our discussion and offer advice and feedback.

Feedback from Scifest should be an excellent stimulus for further refinement of the new variant of the MCE. Important issues to be considered include enhancement of the documentation and introductory materials, the most appropriate form and content for tutorial and dissemination materials (especially for independent use by teachers and pupils), and the development of a suitable interface to the project manager. It should also create new opportunities and ideas for evaluation activities.

There are also some specific agenda items associated with the broader agenda of CONSTRUIT!, some of which may be relevant to our interactions with schoolteachers and students at Scifest itself. These include:

  • Planning for the final conference: It would be useful to review what form the conference might take, and to consider the potential role for teachers especially (cf. our discussion at C15 in Athens).
  • Publications: There are already plans for possible participation (subject to the acceptance of submissions) in the ALT-c conference at Warwick in September and the WiPSCE conference in Munster in October. There will be a workshop devoted to CONSTRUIT! at the UK National Computing at School (CAS) conference in Birmingham in June. Other potential targets with imminent deadlines are iTAG 2016 and PPIG, which will be held in Cambridge. We should discuss the prospects for preparing successful presentations at / submissions to these events.
  • The Interim Report. An interim report will very soon be required in order to secure the rest of the funding for CONSTRUIT!. It would be valuable to review the activities that have taken place to date in conjunction with the objectives set out in the original proposal. Relevant topics may be: plans for virtual workshops / IGGY dissemination / broader evaluation activities associated with the 'six key claims' ('collaboration' and 'assessment' being the two most topical themes) / deployment of funding earmarked for extended visits that is as yet unspent.
  • Future plans: The next transnational project meeting C3 is scheduled to take place at UEF in September - Thursday 15th - Monday 19th. The visit to Scifest 2016 will be an excellent chance to make preliminary plans for C3, and to explore possible links with other communities in Finland who may be interested in joining us at C3. Perhaps a school visit similar to that organised by Edumotiva in Athens last month would be valuable for instance.