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Paul Cameron, who is the CEO of Booktrack, gave a fast paced talk about his company’s journey in the EdTech market. Their backstory was featured in the NZ Herald in 2012. What does their product do? Their website says:

Booktrack offers a new content creation and distribution platform that turns reading into an immersive movie-like experience. Booktrack’s patented technology lets anyone add a synchronized movie-style soundtrack to an e-book or other digital text content, with the audio paced to each individual’s reading speed.

So basically they add an adaptive soundtrack to ebooks. They also have other applications such as Booktrack Studio where the user can add their own soundtrack to existing book. The also have Booktrack Classroom that as well as being designed for use in the classroom, is supported by a number of lesson plans.

The company has 35 employees and won a string of awards. Paul put the success down to being in market (they have an office in San Fransico) and also being part of the ‘Kiwi Mafia’. He described the Kiwi mafia as the network of ex-pat NZer’s living and working overseas. It’s a bit like our 2 degrees of seperation – if Booktrack needed to bend the ear of someone from Google, a quick shout out to some of their kiwi mates lead to a few connections being made.

The biggest challenge that the EdTech industry faced was that everything is free – schools/teachers can’t or won’t pay. Because there are so many free apps for educaitonal use (just think of the Google suite alone), usaully educators can find a free alternative. This makes it hard for start ups with a good idea to get off the ground as they are essentially developing a product for a market that will not pay.

Dan Milward,CEO of Gamefroot, also gave a short talk. Gamfroot looks alot like Scratch. In this he focused on the importance of working with educators when developing apps. His company started of making applications from the Gaming industry but now has a focus on kids learning through making games.

After a quick scope of their site, it was great to see they had some good resources for delivery learning aligned to particular Achievement standards. This is a great carrot for teachers to get hooked into their software.

Professor Tim Bell from Canterbury University (link to article) gave a short presentation on how computational thinking or coding can be used in the curriculum. It was interesting to see some tasks that could be done in class by students with out the need for devices that still taught coding concepts.  One task was the Barcode check digit. There are a number of ways to do this mathematical (here’s one way) but the way Tim demonstrated was to add two rows of 6 to get the 13th digit. (5 + 7 = 2)

Examples of resources for teaching computational thinking

• CS Fieldguide: Senior Students
• CS Unplugged: Primary Students
• CS4HS
• Computational thinking by Google
• CSER Digital Technologies: Online course for teachers
• Barefoot – Computational thinking resource

Interesting factoid: Pixel comes from ‘picture’ and ‘element’ (pic – el)