MEET THE 

GOT-A-HEAD®? TEAM

 

We are Rowena Love and Mark Lawrence, a husband-and-wife team with a wealth of knowledge and experience in fields highly relevant to the project.

 

Our Guinea-Pig-in-Chief is our 11-year-old daughter, Kerensa.

Rowena​

 

I have a mixed portfolio when it comes to skills, talents and experience. 

 

I'm a highly-qualified teacher, so I have a pretty good idea about how to pass on knowledge while making it a fun experience.

 

As a writer and poet, using words effectively and making them count has been my stock-in-trade. 

In the past, I've combined those skills to work as an educational scriptwriter and I will be using what I learned then to enhance the Got-A-Head®? project.

 

As a writer-in-residence for a disability charity and President of Ayr Writers' Club, I designed interesting programmes of study, then booked speakers or devised my own material to bring them to life.

 

For over 10 years, I was Scottish Officer for British Mensa.  Although this was a voluntary role, it did give me plenty of man-, project- and event management skills that will add breadth and depth to Got-A-Head®? There's nothing quite like putting together a four-day conference for 100+ people on an island over 500 miles away to hone your thinking skills and creativity!

MARK

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I have a degree and an interest in history stretching back to my teenage years forty years ago.

 

To earn a crust, however, I have spent 35 years in the software development business. I have worked in the UK, the US, Sweden and 16 years in Ireland. I have worked in many business spheres, in naval technology, for airlines, satellite telemetry, in mineral exploration, in insurance, for the Irish taxman, on marketing web sites and various aspects of telecoms.

In those years developing software systems, I have worked in many different aspects of the automation from user-facing software to elements buried deep in the databases of a far-off server farm, and all sorts of processing between the two endpoints.

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For those in the software systems business, those aspects include graph theory and other long-running algorithms, expert systems, sadly before the big data revolution, service-orientated architecture, databases and middleware, embedded systems, dependency injection, user interface design and test-driven development.

 

Parenthood changed me, as it does everyone who finds themselves having to look after another human being. I also spent six years looking after my mother who was suffering from ever-worsening dementia. These personal factors cause me much thought over the relationships between us and our brain, how our minds work and how we can use technology to live healthier, more thoughtful and more worthwhile lives, which is how I came to work on Got-A-Head®? with my wife.

KERENSA

 

Kerensa is a bright, lively 11-year-old, currently in Year 6.

 

She is a Young Reporter for Potential Plus, which has involved writing articles for them on things as diverse as a Suffragette Walk around London to attending Garter Day, or interviewing people such as Johnny Ball.

 

Kerensa is frequently pressed into service to try out the techniques and exercises that we are developing.

 

What's more, she seems to enjoy them and has asked to do more!