Week 857 & 858

Two weeks beginning Monday, 16th June 2025 - another double-bill!

I travelled back from my holiday on the Isles of Scilly on the Night Riviera sleeper train on the first Tuesday, arriving back in Cambridge by 8am in time for a somewhat bleary-eyed day of work! 🚂😴

Experience CS

We’ve been working pretty much flat out for the last couple of weeks on Experience CS for the Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF). We’ve been supporting the Learning team to publish six integrated computer science units. From the promotional blog post:

We have designed the units to be cross-curricular, so students can learn about computer science concepts while deepening their understanding of related subject area content. For example, in The me project, grade 4 students (ages 9–10) explore the basics of Scratch, personalise sprites, and develop programs to create an animation that tells a story all about them. The project could be integrated into language arts lessons, enabling young learners to explore visual representation and write their own unique stories.

In the Smart communities unit, students in grade 6 (ages 11–12) explore ways in which computing and technology can be used to create environments that are responsive to the needs of community members; this could be included within science or technology lessons.

Part of this work has involved substantial changes and additions to the marketing and supporting pages (e.g. Teaching resources and Getting started) on the site via designs in Figma by Mariam. Chris L has handled the bulk of this work and he’s done a great job of extracting components and keeping our burgeoning CSS under control. 🧑‍🎨

In parallel, we’ve been focussed on completing a first pass at full integration with the classroom management functionality in Code Editor for Education (CEfE).

With help from Chris L, Chris R finished up work on allowing teachers to add a Scratch project to a class in CEfE. Following on from that Seb took on what turned out to be a chunky bit of work to allow students to mark Scratch projects as “finished” in CEfE, indicating their work is ready for review by a teacher. This was a pretty significant milestone, because it completes the key end-to-end journey for the minimum viable product that we first talked to RPF about all those months ago! 🚀

There was a flurry of last minute activity over the last couple of days to get the site ready for another announcement from Google about the demise of their CS First offering and their support for Experience CS as an alternative Scratch coding environment for kids. The email was sent out towards the end of Thursday and so far everything seems to be working OK! 😅🤞

Co-operative news

Somehow in the middle of all this Chris L has found time to completely re-vamp the CoTech website. Natasha from Outlandish is going to help Chris work out how to re-brand the site with the new brand guidelines (logo, font, colours, etc) from Creative Co-op on Monday in time for the Co-op Congress in Rochdale Town Hall. 🎉

This year’s Congress is special, because it’s celebrating the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives. There’s an impressive line up of speakers including Grace Blakeley & Andy Burnham and historical links with the Rochdale Pioneers. I’m sorry I’m not going to be there! 🥲

CoTech is going to have a prominent presence. There will be a stand advertising CoTech; a panel on technology and co-ops; and Natasha from Outlandish and Richard from agile{collective} will lead an hour-long workshop after the panel, focused on selling CoTech and its agencies to the wider co-op movement in the UK. They’re planning to include our work on Experience CS in a showcase - thanks, both! 💪😎

The new kid on the block, workers.coop, seems to be going from strength to strength. And I was pleased to see this report on and proposal for Solid Fund’s strategic annual grant funding for workers.coop. We’ve been contributing to Solid Fund since 2017 and I’ll be pleased if the proposal is agreed. 💷

A while ago, we moved most of our domains from Gandi to domains.coop and we recently received a newsletter from the DotCooperation LLC who run domains.coop. They’re building a World Map of Co-ops - it was quite fun to discover that we’ve been included! 🌍

Other news

Somehow Chris R and Chris L have also managed to find the time to complete an application for GOV.UK’s latest iteration of the Digital Outcomes and Specialists framework. It’s been a while since we’ve applied for an opportunity via this framework, but you’ve got to be in it to win it! 📜

Chris L also made it down to Brighton Ruby last week. He said there were a lot of good talks and he enjoyed catching up with Ruby folk. He managed a brief chat with Marty Haught from Ruby Central who Chris R has been working with on the RubyForge redirects project. Marty was on his way back to the USA from Baltic Ruby. ✈️

Last weekend Chris R took part in Runway 25 at Manston Airport where you have 8 hours “to run/walk or crawl as few or as many laps as you like within the time limit”. He managed about 33km which is seriously impressive given the heat! 🥵

Today Chris L has taken his family down to an outdoor activity centre in the New Forest and Chris R is at his daughter’s school sports day. We’re hoping he doesn’t come a cropper in the dads’ race like Chris L did a couple of weeks ago! 🙏

Right - I’m off to the pub! 🍺☀️

Until next time!

– James