HelloCatFood

As you may or may not know I do a bit of community work and workshop work. I’d usually document this on this website but I felt it deviated from my personal artwork a bit and I consider the hellocatfood name to be my artist persona, so for that reason I set up www.antonioroberts.com. It focuses completely on my community and education work and hopefully gives that side of my work a more professional feel. Go have a look-see!

I attended the Digital Play course run by Playtrain recently. Even though there’s only so much you can learn in a single-day course this course really did give me a lot of ideas on what to do with multimedia in the workshop environment.

I know that sometimes the idea of introducing computers into teaching can seem daunting! Computers are pretty unstable, so add children and pressure into the mix and it’s a potential recipe for disaster! This course really did show me that multimedia doesn’t have to be all that confusing and some of the simplest technology can have the greatest effect.

Here’s one of the pieces I produced:

It’s not fancy, but for children, and even the people attending the workshop it was really really fun, and I think that’s one of the more important things about education and learning.

Here’s a image from a workshop I delivered as part of a group on the topic of Culture in relation to Birmingham. It was a big project, so we decided to collaborate online, which proved very useful!

Flying Start is now over and, due to a lack of funding, looks like it will completely end after five years It’s a real shame that funding has affected what is quite an essential course for budding community artists. The only other one I’ve seen is one at Staffordshire University but, unlike Flying Start, you have to pay for it.

The course has been of great benefit to me! Prior to it I had just graduated and had only done a bit of work in schools thanks to the Student Associates Scheme. Thanks to the course I now feel a lot more prepared to work in schools and the community on small and big projects! Check out more information on my workshops here.

Also, for all you budding workshops deliverers, here’s a useful pdf booklet about delivering workshops