On a cold Wednesday morning, myself, Tom and Pedro went down to Brighton to deliver a day of workshops for the Hijack Family Festival, part of a week long programme organised for children from 2-12 involving art, film, comedy, and science and technology. It was a non-stop day running robot wars, air rockets, our UV light workshop and crazy contraptions.
See if you can spot our workshops in their video of the whole week!
We've just finished running a rocketry activity at a corporate workshop for a BP team. This is a great activity as it can be done at multiple levels with all ages and abilities. With the more able (and adult) group that we had today we can cover a lot of ground in a few hours, exploring some theory as well as building and flying a couple of rockets.
This is about the third version now of our laser tag system for Tech Camp. Every time we've built a batch with kids we've made it simpler. This time we decided that we needed just one main PCB; it now has the batteries, sensors, microcontroller, LED display bank and associate circuitry on it.
On Wednesday Townley Grammar School celebrated their STEAM day, one of their three annual off-curriculum days. We were glad to take part in this celebration. It was great for us to work exclusively with girls as sometimes our technology workshops are seen more as boy’s activities, which is not the case.
Only men being techies is a stereotype up to a certain point, but with the male population providing the lion’s share in the digital industry, questions are being asked why women are in the minority of employees in this field. It could be argued that boys are given remote control cars, planes, trains, robots and drones as presents and therefore are introduced to technology from an early age – or at least that was the case maybe a decade or so ago.
First day of the Abu Dhabi Science Festival and workshops have just opened. We're down at the Corniche (the beach) along with many other workshops both inside and outside (primarily in air conditioned tents as it's so hot out here).
It's the last day of the science festival and it's been a busy time. We've had to ration out the UV torches as otherwise we would have run out a couple of days ago. We even had to close this workshop one evening when a mini riot started outside with parents trying to get their kids inside (no, we're not joking!)
As a parent, it can be difficult knowing where to start when it comes to getting your children started with programming. With more and more schools offering computer science for GCSE, and teaching programming instead of just Microsoft Office during ICT lessons, it has never been more important to get started early!
In October and November we enjoyed running a couple of different workshops on light. The first one was “Light, Lasers & Illusions”. During the presentation the children discovered how our eyes can be tricked, how we can burst balloons with different coloured lasers, and how a drop of water can be turned into a simple but impressive microscope.
Just finished our Easter Test Pilot again and had a terrific time. We had an Easter event last year but this time around we wanted to run a really small event just to try out our new courses for 2016. We figured this would both give us an incentive to develop the courses in a more detailed manner longer before the summer and also to be able to use the feedback of the campers to improve things for when we’re inundated with hundreds of campers in a few months’ time.
Would your child love to learn the art of game design? It goes without saying, the tech industry has never been bigger and is likely only to grow in the future. If you have a child interested in game design, this could be a potentially exciting career path for them to pursue once they grow up.