Arts Award is one of these tools, as is for instance Minecraft or Music, that really helps us focus on the "process driven" nature of making stuff, where the only limit is your imagination and where you have complete control over content and topic. What I mean by that is the "project" lifecycle follow a similar process; from coming up with an idea, to you getting on with the task of creating what is in your imagination and it becoming a tangible something. This making up about 75% of the making process (planning stage), with the last 25% happening as you are expressing your imagination in your chosen media be it paint, the guitar or coding in C++.
I left school with 3 GCSE in Dance, French and Physics having failed both Maths and English. I was convinced that education and I were just not right for each other, but it did not mean I had to stop learning stuff, I am and always will be a huge Science Fiction buff, a layman's pathway to Science and Technology. I started work as a receptionist for a recruitment agency and spent the next 10 years of my life climbing that work ladder by recruiting people, during which at an open evening at Brunel university, I was given an accidental second chance to rethink how I thought about "Me and Education" by this ancient petit math professor who helped me see that I was perhaps not as hopeless as I might have been lead to believe at school and that I could do maths after all. Although it did take an additional 5 years of me playing role-playing games online which made me build my own gaming computers, to gather the courage to apply to university with my 3 GCSE in hand to do Computer science. #Leap of faith!
I wanted to recruit for the IT industry but each time I met a person within it, they were talking Martian to me, so I thought the best way to get to know the "Speak" was go join them as an anthropologist would and study their culture. What I discovered was one of the most well-balanced and creative people I had ever come across -- that is, as soon as I stopped judging them by my standards because their form of self expression did not conform to my tiny view of the world. That's when I can say, I truly started to "See" them for what they are, just people, rather than what I expected them to be as sold to me by television and the media; an Avatar film moment "I see you" and interestingly "You" see me back too #surprise
My first lesson in coding was on how to make a "Cup of tea", surprisingly hard and thought provoking, if I could write the process for making tea, what else could I write a process for….? You see to an engineer failure is just the start of a conversation, not the end, you have no idea how liberating this was to someone who thought they had failed at education #hope
What I learnt was how to think in a way that was "Process driven" to help me find a way to fix what I wanted fixing and it gave me a resilience, I didn't even know I had. This then led me over many bumpy roads to starting my part time Masters this year in Digital Education this time for me, rather than to prove a point. I did not end up as a software engineer but an engineer at finding people within the IT industry and by learning to speak "Process" moderately well, I now understood most forms of Martian.
Tech is so much more than what's written on the box, the real surprise is hidden in what's in the box. This year I am co-hosting the #youthZone at the Mozilla festival 7th and 8th, why not come for some career advice with our first session planned on saturday the 7th at 10:45 AM with "What are jobs in tech anyways!" and meet a range of IT professionals from people like me who took the long road, to straight A star students and everything in between at #MozFest, just come find out more for yourself.
MozFest runs from 6-8th November 2015. Image courtesy Steve Johnson via Flickr
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