I am Marc Williams from New Zealand. I left school at age 17 to become an architect. I have 38 years experience as an architect on more than 100 built projects. I have owned my own digital media company.
I am a registered secondary school teacher that specialises in digital technology, design and architecture. I have taught digital and architecture project based learning to more than 3000 students aged 13 to 20.
My academic qualifications are:
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Bachelor of Architecture
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Bachelor of Architectural Studies
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Master of Education Degree (Computational Thinking, Computer Science, Programming)
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Graduate Diploma Secondary Teaching (Digital)
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Graduate Diploma Creative Technologies
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Diploma 3D Animation (with Distinction)
I left school at 17 and spent 6 months studying architecture at Unitec. One of my teachers was Bram Van Mel, a student of the Bauhaus.
I started working full time in architects offices since 18 years old. I continued my architecture studies part time. I got my architecture degree's from Auckland University.
I worked for Andrew Patterson on these projects; Knight Klisser (House of the Year 1991), Axis, D72 and the Summer Street house. I worked at Hulena Architects.
In 2004 I stopped working in architects offices to focus on digital architecture and education. Box House is a digital architecture project from 2005.
In 2006, I created New Zealand Visual Effects, my digital media company.
I designed my studio to produce high end digital media content for architects, tv commercials, artists, national and international media agencies.
Check out the NZ Visual Effects page for how I designed the studio and the two tables.
I employed an awesome staff of expert modellers, animators and visual effects artists to make this happen. Some examples of the work we created: Canon, Sony, Baja, Koala, LTNZ.
We created Digitalwind, a computational fluid dynamics wind simulation technology based on atmospheric data to scientifically analyse the effects of wind around architecture.
In 2011, I become a specialist digital technology secondary school teacher
I was the the senior digital technology teacher at Alfriston College from 2011 to 2022. I taught a wide variety of Computer Science subjects, design and architecture project based learning and the eLearning professional development of the teachers and staff. I was responsible for teaching more than 3000 Year's 9 to 13 students, including 500 Year 13 students over 10 years.
I created digital.school.nz
These videos are NZQA assessment projects by two of my 2021 Year 13 students.
Minecraft at Alfriston College. Minecraft is a virtual reality game platform for authentic, collaborative and cognitive learning experiences.
In 2012, I started the use of Minecraft for learning in the schools digital curriculum I developed. In 2013, a group of my Year 9+10 students recreated the school in Minecraft, we put a video of it on YouTube. Auckland Museum saw our video and invited us to collaborate.
I created minecraft.school.nz
In 2014 Auckland War Memorial Museum commissioned Alfriston College students to recreate the landscape of 1915 Gallipoli in Minecraft for the 100 year anniversary of World War One ANZAC 2015 exhibition. 35 of my students built an authentic version of the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey where the military campaign happened. This Gallipoli Minecraft world was shared with every school in New Zealand for students to learn about Gallipoli and is still available for worldwide download.
I was responsible for developing the Alfriston College Computer Science curriculum. Students learnt Java, Python and other programming languages to develop projects for NZQA L1 to L3 Computer Science assessments.
Between 2011 and 2016 we ran our own school Minecraft server and developed a world for students to learn to the principles of Computer Science by coding in a fun game based environment. Students used Lua (the programming language Minecraft is based on) to program Minecraft Turtles to do tasks using Loops, While Loops, If Statements, Variables, Functions and Array commands. These videos show examples of student programmed turtles navigating the world maze, digging, building and breaking blocks activities using the six coding commands.
Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2016 and made some changes to the game. We stopped using our server and modified our Computer Science curriculum to suit the new changes which included the introduction of programmable robot Agents using Microsoft MakeCode and Code Connection based on JavaScript.
We created a NZQA AS91883 Computer Programming assessment which the Year 11 students code within Minecraft, these two videos show examples of the students assessment projects.
I started Architect School in 2022