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!
Jack just finished building up the robots for the Abu Dhabi Science Festival in October. We've made a couple of recent changes; adding a table tennis ball as a coaster on the front, and cutting out some fluorescent vinyl stickers that should look good under the UV light in the arena they are constructing for us.
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.
As part of our visit to IBM for the Raspberry Pi day we had a tour of IBM's museum. During the tour we were shown some of IBM's typewriters and after a long (but concise) explanation of the development of the typewriter, one of the kids asked what did these 'typewriter' things do? It never struck the rest of us adults that most of the children would never have seen one of these before.
Does your child love the idea of designing a video game? Tech Camp is the original and one of the most well-known tech camps, holding fun and educational events all over the UK. With our awe-inspiring technology camps, your child can learn to design a computer game, build a robot or learn how to code- all skills that are useful for the future!
It's no wonder that coding is more fashionable today than ever before. The ability to program is undoubtedly one of the most important skills for the current generation of children to have leading into their adult lives. In 2015, 7 million job openings required the ability to code in the US (Burning Glass) and it is known that the best way to learn is to start early. A coding camp is a great way to introduce the next generation to the most important skill of the future. While popular culture can often make coding seem a daunting and tricky skill, that is far from the truth. Programming is a skill which everyone can learn.
We’ve been tinkering with a new addition to our laser tag course. The new system is pretty advanced but we wanted campers to go home with a simpler way of controlling it that doesn’t need a WiFi connection. We’ve recreated a version of our previous hand-held controller box that can be used to start and stop games, and even act as team bases for capture the flag.
We've just designed a new kit for The Science Museum and popped in tonight to see how the kids got on. It's for their Science Nights so it had to be simple; they have around 450 kids in each time they run it, in classes of 150 at a time!
Our t-shirts arrived today! Here's Cameron modelling them. In case you can't see it, they say 'born to create'. We're pretty happy how they turned out.
Tech Camp are heading up to the Newcastle Maker Faire again, and this time we’re bringing our very own time machine! It’s top secret at the moment but we can speed-up, slow-down, freeze, and even reverse the flow of water using the three ‘time controls’! We’ll be making up a few of these machines for the public to try out as it’s hard to stop playing with them once you start!
With technology now so central to our modern lives, it can be difficult to know how to keep ourselves safe online, let alone keeping our children (who seem to know more about it than we do) safe too! To help out with this, we have created a brand-new course for this year, Cyberspy Academy, designed to teach children all about digital security and staying safe online.