For a while now I have been intrigued by the concept of the Google 20% project where Google gives their engineers ‘Innovation Time Off’ to work on projects of their own choosing. These have led to Many different projects being developed and officially released by Google such as Google News, Gmail and Adsense. I have also been reading an interactive ebook on the iPad called ‘The final hours of Portal 2′ about the background leading up to the release of Portal 2 by Valve. In it Gabe Newell the head of Valve possibly sensing a creative slump gets his staff to abandon usual design and development cycles and spend a period of time just simply playing and creating. I noted with interest that they were fine with spectacular failures something which the school system isn’t. Within our own school we have been talking a lot about independent learning and how to foster it. For myself as an ICT teacher I am interested not only in independent learning but also in how to encourage creativity within my subject. Up until a few years ago the modules I was delivering within class were almost purely based on what we could within Microsoft Office. the girls were bored rigid and I was bored rigid. Modules therefore revolved around me coming up with something for the pupils to do in Office and my pupils then being forced to get on with it. Using 20% projects and the idea of giving pupils their own time (still structured) to develop their own products, content or systems I thought would be a way of breaking out of the cycle of boring Victorian teaching with technology. The PDF file attached to this post is therefore a summary of the key points of my 20% project (partly done to test my new iPad). In a nutshell though by spending most of the year teaching a group about a range of different systems from basic games programming to sketch up and then giving them a term to do their own projects I hope the end value of what they produce will show them that individual creativity within ICT is possible. I still give them a structure to use so they still have to follow a simple systems life cycle of design, create, test and evaluate so they will not be ‘running free’ but I do hope it will produce some fantastic outcomes.
