Home index file on Headtilt

I built a simulator for testing out swarms of micro:bits each running different code.

Years ago I remember listening to the audio book version of Freakonomics and the in particular the story about baby names (I think a standalone podcast episode can be found here).

After being recommended it by a former colleague, I was listening to the “You can learn with AI” episode of the Change, Technically podcast (which was really good, check it out) and it got me thinking: As educators, what do we really want to get out of ge…

It’s 2026 and I’ve been trying to decide what AI and LLMs are useful for in my day to day teaching.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) Clipy, an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) Clipy, an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble This is part of a(n aspirationally) series of posts documenting some of the process of (building|cat herding an AI agent to build) an easily hosted Python teaching tool built with just front-end JS and a WASM port of MicroPython.

Pre(r)amble I’m in a strange place in my head with respect to coding agents.

Note: There’s a companion post to this about using agentic AI here.

Pre(r)amble It’s hard to avoid all the AI infesting everything these days, but apart from using completions a bit in VSCode Copilot with the occasional conversation about different libraries (which I find a pretty pleasant way to learn about new things, e…

January / Genuary is over for another year, and I’m coming to the end of my enforced holiday, starting my new remote teaching job this week.

The last couple of months I’ve been working through Reuven Lerner’s Pandas Workout book.

I was mentoring at our local fortnightly Coder Dojo session yesterday and heard a couple of students talking about getting help from ChatGPT.

TL;DR; I’ve given Publii the boot and shifted this site to hugo.

As a teacher of relatively hands-on subjects, I regularly get roped into running sessions with groups of Year 6 students coming in for Orientation Days.

I recently got around to trying out the new-ish Python mode for coding within Minecraft: Education Edition, and whilst it is refreshing to be able to write code, the lack of a code library to be able to refer to made learning the Minecraft-specific comman…

Back in 2017 when I was first thinking about how I could use physical computing like Micro:bits in my classroom, I wrote some quick and nasty programs to demonstrate networking concepts like attenuation and latency in wireless connections as well as adapt…

Last year when looking at wireless concepts with my Year 8 Digital Technologies students, I wrote a program for wireless beacons and laser cut a Ghostbusters style PKE Meter with some servos and a RGB LED for students to go on a hunt in our library.

In 2019 I started up a programming-oriented Data Science class with my Year 10s.

This is a bit of a retrospective of teaching Robotics as a subject to Year 8 students this year.

Motivation This term I’ve been working through Data Representation and some Networks concepts with my Year 8 students.

Motivation Ever since I bought some of Kitronik’s :move buggies I’ve been interested in making robots with the Micro:bit.

This post is intended to be a bit of a primer for teachers interested in getting into more varied use of the BBC Micro:bit beyond the inbuilt basics.

Testing out LDR sensors This year I have been teaching robotics to Year 8s for the first time.

This is the first year that Digital Technologies has been a mandatory part of the Australian curriculum through to Year 8.

Background I’ve been using Minecraft Education Edition with Code Connection in my Year 7 classes this term to teach programming principles, which has been a blast* (i.e.

I’ve been getting a bit antsy about continuing to pay Squarespace to host Headtilt, mostly due to the infrequent updates that I seem to be doing over the last couple of years, and partly because I think I feel the need to tinker with stuff.

When deciding to play around with Publii (after taking a dislike to Jekyll, and not finding anything else that tickled my fancy), the first problem seemed to be that despite supporting tags for posts, there was no way to create an RSS or JSON feed based on

Security of Wireless Networks My previous lesson looking at wireless networks used Microbits and their Bluetooth networking to illustrate some of the problems with local wireless networks (as opposed to general internet connectivity, which we mostly did by

Overview Part of the new Digital Technologies curriculum for year 7 and 8 involves students learning about wired and wireless networks, and methods of data transmission and security.

A couple of weeks back I saw a link on Twitter to a post on Laura Bain’s blog about data transmission with year 4 and 5s.

The Backstory Before Christmas I was noodling around with Affinity Designer in an attempt to be a bit better at design.

After using the new MBP for a week, I’m coming to appreciate the apps that do a good job with their Touch Bar behaviour.

Obligatory New Toy Post Because I have no self control, I managed to justify to myself that I needed an update on my 2012 13" Macbook Air, and bought a 13" Macbook Pro with Touch Bar (hats off to Apple for making the product names roll off the tongue on t…

Preface: Since there’s so much seemingly conflicting information out there, I’ve quite possibly gotten it wrong.

The Australian Curriculum has been going through the “everything is changing” part of the ten-yearly cycle recently.

I teach a lot of different students this year - the entire year 9 cohort, most of the year 7s and 8s (spread over the year), and a few classes of year 10s.

So there’s a certain element of hyperbole coming up.

I’ve written about my Pebble before and the things that I like about it.

My wife and I recently returned from Honeymoon Part 2 on Kangaroo Island in South Australia.

I shuffle my attention between four devices: a (beloved if aging) 2012 13" Macbook Air iPhone 6S+ iPad Air 2 Work Surface Pro 3 Because I split my attention between them all, it can be a struggle to manage the list of things that are interesting to me so…

This morning I woke up to an email from Smile Software titled “TextExpander 5 Lives!”

I remember someone else talking up Slack’s release notes before, but looking at them side by side with Box’s lately… I honestly don’t know why Box bothered with more than the first line since the other three dot points mean exactly the same as the single…

Since deciding to turn part time hobby development for myself into a part time hobby that produces stuff others might actually buy, I’ve been looking through my list of ideas and trying to figure out some sort of progression through them.

Sleep wake on laptops is terrible.

There was a fair bit of chatter in the blogs that I follow today that Smile’s TextExpander is changing from an upgrade pricing model to a subscription model (details at their pricing page).