Teaching and learning in Kyrgyzstan
Have you ever heard of Kyrgyzstan? Two years ago I had no idea where exactly this country was. And this year it was already the second time I traveled to this amazing country in Central Asia.
Everything started when Gerrit Beine asked me to join him giving a workshop about agile software development in Bischkek (here some impressions from 2012).
This year I was offered the possibility to teach, inspire and learn again in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. This time Michel Löhr joined in as the main coach for the agile workshop at KSUCTA University. And it was amazing this time I was already used to the not so good things like infrastructure or air pollution (which has improved in a good way over the last two years) and then on the other side I saw all this beauty!
The nature is stunning and looking to those massive mountains just outside of Bishkek is amazing. Hiking in those mountains was even more rewarding and then you had the people of Kyrgyzstan: Awesome! So friendly, hospitable, open minded and curious people it was a wonderful experience. Every day at least two students took care of us by doing activities to explore nature, culture, people or food. Thank you all for making this possible.
The 5 days agile software development workshop was a lot of fun where we taught the basics of Scrum. With a lot of games and interactive exercises so that the students could experience the agile culture first hand and learn to work and improve as a team and excel with each iteration.
I’m already looking forward to inspire, teach and learn more in this wonderful country called Kyrgyzstan in the next years.
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- Yeah with my new Kyrgyz cap
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- With Turkish Airline to Bishkek
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- Winner team of another game, so much fun 🙂
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- Ok the space in this car is used well 🙂
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- Traditional meal
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- Our workshop participants
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- Test driven development exercise
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- Winner team of one of the many games we did to teach them real work life challanges
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- street impression in Bishkek
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- Awesome nature 🙂
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- Delicous pizza I could have eaten each day
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- Cinema
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- Mounts outside of Bishkek
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- Students playing the Marshmallow game
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- OK this is an interesting menu 10kg lamb (!!!)
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- Company fair
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- Winner of the Marshmallow challange. Awesome iterative approach!
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- 1 € = 70 Som
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- Part of the 1st student company contact fair in Bischkek
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- Preparing the workshop agenda
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- Our favorite restaurant with our favorite waiter (he did not speak english and we no russian but sign language and pictures are going a long way 🙂
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- Food was very delicous
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- Interesting experience and out of my comfort zone but it was fun 🙂
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- Our stand at the fair
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- Madina our interpreter for the 10 days
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- SCRUM Flow Overview
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- Michel and Sven enjoying the hike
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- Alina
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- Michel and Sven on their way to Bishkek
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- Thank you for showing me around
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- Thanks for the great day trip!
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- Bazar impressions
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- mmmhhh how delicious
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- Teamwork
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- Madina our interpreter for the time in Kyrgyzstan
How to make your Dreamplan work
Ever thought about making your New Years Resolutions work? Well I have some ingredients for you to achieve your dreams. At least those are the ingredients I use already successfully for the last couple of years to attain my dreams:
(1) Write your dreams on paper
This helps me to vizualize my dream. As we all get distracted once in a while this is a great reminder to look at the goals we dream about to achieve
(2) The dreams should be SMART
Setting up tangible dreams which are archivable given my current situation is the second key to achieve them
Specific: Be as specific as possible about your dream!
Top 3 things I have learned
Recently I had a talk with a very good friend of mine and he asked me an amazing question
What are the top 3 things you have learned on your trip?
We were talking on the phone and so I was ready to argue myself out of this question with telling him: “This is a tough question, let me think about it for a day” but he said: “NO! Trust your guts and come up with three things!”
So here they are my top 3 things I learned on my 6 month around the world trip:
- Self awareness of my goals and how I want to live my life (My perfect day which I wrote down more than a year ago is really archivable and I love it!)
- Trust in my own strength and my principals for life, i.g. I love people and I love to inspire people with my thoughts and my radiant optimism (Personal Mission)
- Growth of self confidence and taking baby steps into the direction I want to develop
I love this question so much and believe it’s great to ask this question once in a while to yourself or to your friends.