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.
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.
"I started at Tech Camp firstly as a camper in 2008. As a child at the time I loved creating small robots and coding, but my parents had struggled to find anywhere I could work on advanced projects like this outside the home until they discovered Tech Camp."
Tech Camp has a long list of successful former students, many of whom return to teach the next generation of inventors. We pride ourselves in keeping our family ties close and the truth is, many of our tutors want to continue their relationship with Tech Camp despite success in their own careers. Let’s look at a few of our stellar students and how they’ve progressed...
We're at the Abu Dhabi Science Festival running a workshop called "Light Fantastic" and we're having a fantastic time running it! The children are making some amazing light painting images - have a look below to see the images from the gallery. Please note that the gallery has multiple pages - use the 'last' button to go to the most recent ones. We'll be updating these daily.
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!
Just finished the first of our Tech Weekends. We had a great time (and hope the children did as well!) Most of them opted to build a laser tag game gun but Barney chose other kits and it was interesting to see what he was able to do with connecting some off-the-shelf kits. His first one was a siren with adjustable pitch and sound effect.
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.
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.
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.
We recently received an email from one of our campers way back in our second year (2009) when we ran a biotech course. One of the projects was to make your own biosphere, a sealed self-sustaining ecosystem. We would have been impressed with one year, but this one is still going strong after four! If anyone else still has a biosphere, please do send us a picture!
Myself and Tom have spent the week down at Forres Sandle Manor school in the New Forest, running a 'Rockets and Robotics' programme for 14 children. At the end of each year, the school have a 'project week' where all the children choose from a wide range of activities to do for the week, such as cycling, needlecraft, sports and even trips abroad.
We returned to Cheltenham Science Festival again this year for the family fun weekend, and had an excellent two days with perfect weather! We also took part in the schools workshop programme earlier in the week, debuting our new electricity show and musical Tesla Coil.
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.
A few of you may remember our RC planes from Aerospace Camp last year – one of the campers, Matthew Prett, has been making a few alterations since then and not only is it still flying, but he has managed to get some excellent footage from it using a GoPro Hero 3 camera.