Many thanks to Mark Matthews at Trinity College who spent some considerable time with me today discussing his research into the potential of computer games to engage adolescents
in therapeutic activities and therapeutic services. He’s working on some fascinating applications for the web and mobile devices that act to enhance the relationship between a psychiatrist and their patients. This is Mark’s PhD at CRITE in TCD. He is now nearing the end of a marathon 5 year PhD.

I was in Trinity College today and met with James Bligh who is the man behind Drumsteps. Drumsteps is a very intuitive and very funky piece of software that teaches students about musical rhythm. It uses a waterfall GUI that is totally different to anything I have seen before. Drumsteps was James’s Masters project and boy what a project it is. It’s featured by the BBC and is now on their website also. See here.
As technology enhanced learning goes, this is one beautiful project and yet another one that make sme think – “I wish I’d thought of that!”

Randy Pausch’s by now famous last lecture, has been watched by millions of people on the internet. It’s a lecture about life, love, dreams, kids, achievements and lastly a little bit of CS. Randy Pausch is in the advanced stages of cancer and thus the ‘last’ bit. If you ever attend or watch one lecture in your life, this is a pretty good’un.  Lecture video here. (many thanks to John Kelleher for this link).  See Randy Pausch’s CMU page here

Computer Science (CS) is hard. It’s hard stuff to learn and often the way we teach it is downright boring.  How do you teach kids hard stuff ?
Make it fun that’s how. This is an area I’m interested in.
As usual the boffins are ahead of me. The CS people at Carnegie Mellon University have developed such a teaching aid.
Have a look at Alice.org.  Alice is a very innovative 3D programming environment that allows kids to create an animation for telling a story, play an interactive game, or a video and share on the web. It’s graphically rich, visually interesting and above all it’s FUN.
There is an introductory video explaining Alice far better than I ever could here (wmv)  or here (quicktime).