RUGroom at City College Norwich

One of the proudest moments for me recently was on Friday 8th February at City College, Norwich. This was the grand opening of the RUGroom space, which was created in less than one year and has been in use for the last few months. Our role was to initially specify the technology that would best support and extend the learning opportunities and in so doing we found we were getting more drawn in to the physical design. Not wanting to do a job badly, we called on the skills of Team A Go Go to help with the interior design. The blend of our combined knowledge and understanding of spaces and how they can be used has resulted in a unique space which is providing first class support for the students, who are all autistic.

We combined our knowledge and understanding of how technology can be used to engage learners with our approach to digital creativity and created a program of events, which we delivered to the college on a week by week basis. At the same time as this, we invited a small group to our offices in Chelmsford so that they can help specify and design the online space, too.

The opening on Friday was attended by none other than Charles Clarke, MP for the City and former Secretary of State for Education. He spoke of the potential that is within all learners and the importance of unleashing that, which of course is what we believe, too! Our programme of sessions, run brilliantly by Matthew Eaves, has shown repeatedly that there are ways to engage all learners, and it is about finding the way in… technology is important, but interestingly, not always essential. A lot depends on the learner, the subject and of course the purpose for the activity.

The BBC ‘Look East’ news team were there in the shape of Louise Holmes (who we worked alongside in 2006 with the BBC Blast project), and the event was reported on BBC Look East throughout the afternoon and early evening. A snapshot of this is available on YouTube.

There is more about all this on the Digital Creativity web site, which explores what we did, why we did it and what we found out.