Workshop in Dundee, fun in Edinburgh

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As I write this, I'm in the air to Tenerife but let's start with last week. We went to Scotland, Dundee in particular to the HCIED 2009 conference. This is the same conference I went to last year in Rome, and is comprised of the educators of HCI so its a very interesting conference with a lot of people who are passionate about pushing HCI forward and exploring how it can be taught. Dzl and I were going to teach a workshop. It was our first conference workshop and hopefully, the first of many. We had five workshop participants, all of whom were familiar with computers, software, programming, and more geeky stuff so it was a very different workshop than our typical new-to-computer-programming crowd. We didn't expect this and so it was a really interesting experience, we turned our backs at one point to help another participant and two of the participants had their Arduino boards up and running the first program, complete with a blinking light. We changed our tune a bit and started to give them basic introductions and more technically descriptions of what we were doing and let them loose. Within no time at all they were all playing and having fun making movement in the real world from their computer screens. One participant hooked up two servo motors to a joystick to control them, another programmed a self-correcting stick which would constantly adjust to its own movement, and another, who was a very interesting person, a blind computer programmer (software engineer) who could not see the wires and circuit board but managed with the help of his helper to put together a potentiometer with two motors that he could then feel the movement through, it was very inspiring, and we learned that the software we use doesn't allow for him to read it like normal text; so we'll ask the people who make the software to try and improve it.

From the workshop we went on to Edinburgh and had an amazing weekend. First off, we ended up getting a beautiful hotel, the George hotel which was right near Princes street, the main shopping street. It was gorgeous, a modern hotel with amazing rooms and a fantastic bottle of wine, delivered to our room. We spent three days wandering through parts of the city I hadn't seen before, Rose street with its tons of pubs and cafes, listening to pipers on every corner, going for deep fried mars bar and ridiculously fattening pub food, and had a great night out, drinking all of Scotland, until the Last Drop, a great pub we found near the end of our journey that night.

Scotland was a fantastic trip; we got to do our first conference workshop and had a fantastic vacation with it.

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Comments

[Priscilla]

I want a deep fried mars bar....!