Workshops at MaketechX, November 2013, Berlin

Hey everyone,

the first edition ever of the MaketechX-Conference will be held in Berlin, November 8-9th 2013. I’ll be part of a Fireside chat on Friday to talk about OpenTechSchool, Hackership and the transformation of education through technology and the internet.

But as it is really hard to explain the joy and atmosphere we have at our workshops, as people don’t get why this isn’t the same as school or university if I just tell them, my thought was the best way would be to have them experience it. So I asked for two slots to run our workshops and got an approval. The plan is to have one two hours tinkering introduction into Arduino on Saturday from 11am-1pm and the start of the introduction to programming with python for another two hours from 3pm-5pm that afternooon. With the option to do another one on Friday afternoon, if we find the coaches for it.

As the participants are at least partly from bigger businesses (who we’d really like to introduce to OTS and our endeavor), they probably won’t have their laptops with them, so I organised that ImmobilienScout is going to borrow us 8 of theirs and Technology Stiftung Berlin is going to give us the necessary IT-Labs-USB-Sticks to boot them - which already includes our workshop environment. Aside from that MaketechX will give us up to ten Arduino boards to run the workshops, but will also donate them to us as a thank you (and we can even tell them, which one we’d most like to get).

So, what I am looking for are coaches to run the workshops with me. At least another two each, as we are thinking, we won’t be hosting more than 10 people at a time anyways. The learning material is ready, I am organising everything around it. As a perk, I can give you a ticket to enjoy the whole conference if you volunteer to coach and help out.

If interested let me know here or via email (ben at opentechschool dot org).

Thanks
Ben

Thanks for volunteering, we can now host both workshops on Saturday as planned (and that is awesome). If you are interested in making something happen on Friday, too, please contact me.