Words

Ideas, essays, and talks with practical use.

In 460BCE, Plato argued that the written word would make us all dumber.

"calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."

Luckily, we know this because someone wrote it down.

Talks Reel

If embeds are blocked, open the full playlist on YouTube.

Latest Words

Paper

Research Paper

From Blank Page to Brilliance: The OCEAN Approach to LLM Prompting, presents a practical, step-by-step framework that helps educators and professionals use large language models with clarity and confidence. By structuring prompts into five purposeful stages—Objective, Context, Examples, Assess, and Negotiate—it turns what can feel like a messy, unpredictable exchange into a repeatable, ethical, and human-centred process. Grounded in research and real-world use, OCEAN improves output quality while strengthening accountability, transparency, and critical oversight - positioning AI as a collaborator that extends human capability, not replaces it.

Article Students creating Scratch projects

Ready, set, Scratch: A beginner's guide to creative coding

A welcoming, practical introduction to Scratch for absolute beginners, this article breaks down how to start creating with code and emphasises experimentation over perfection, ideal for anyone curious about creative coding or teaching it to others.

Article Learners discussing AI and ethics in a classroom

OCEAN Prompting Process

The OCEAN Prompting process is a structured guide to effectively using Large Language Models (LLMs) for co-authoring content. The acronym stands for Objective (defining your goal), Context (providing necessary background, tone, and specific details), Examples (offering one-shot, few-shot, or many-shot examples to guide the output), Assess (checking the output for accuracy, bias, and adherence to goals), and Negotiate (conversational refinement of the results). The process emphasizes the user's responsibility to ensure the final output's quality, accuracy, and alignment with organizational principles, culminating in a mandatory Final Step: Human Edit before submission.

See pages 32-33 in Hello World 25.

Try the CodeClub project version suitable for young and old people: rpf.io/llmprompt.

Article Social Action Hackathon with Scouts participants

Social Action Hackathon with the Scouts

This article captures a hackathon where young Scouts used tech to tackle real social challenges, highlighting how computing skills can connect with community issues and empower meaningful creative problem-solving. It also shows how roleplay, teamwork, and rapid prototyping can turn technical learning into purposeful action, with young people designing practical ideas for real-world impact.

Book Section, pp. 122-123

Project-based learning: a path to agency

Project-based learning: a path to agency makes the case that the most powerful learning happens when the project is the unit. By asking students to design solutions to real problems, learning emerges through investigation, iteration, and making, rather than assessment-first activities. The piece shows how agency increases engagement, builds transferable skills, and reframes the teacher's role from delivering answers to enabling discovery, with practical examples drawn from hackathons and classroom-ready resources.