Tech Camp Blog

After a slightly stressful journey (our train was delayed, the children were very well behaved!) we made it back from Edinburgh on Friday at the end of Tech Train 2013. We had a really fun, interesting (and hopefully educational) week of workshops, shows and sightseeing.

We've just opened up bookings for the 2013 season, and have some great news. We now have a wide range of courses from the technology of chocolate, to robotics, rocketry, game design, and even the Raspberry Pi. Our main events are now open to a much wider age range (9-17), with separate course choices for the younger and older campers.

We had a great day today at Accenture, running some workshops for their "Bring Your Child to Work" day. We ran three workshops simultaneously; a version of our "Steady Hand" game (pictured), a UV torch workshop, and a session building crazy contraptions using our construction kit that we've been developing.

Jack and Tom went to the London Science Museum tonight to run a workshop for their 'lates' programme. We've done quite a few workshops for their 'Science Night' programme (for kids), but working with adults opens up a few more possibilities! The theme of the night was 'alcohol', so we ran a version of our 'Chocolate and Orange' caviar using Cointreau.

We had a great day today playing with our new construction system at the Old Blue Coat School in Thatcham. Around 25 children helped us test it out and made all manner of contraptions. We were pretty pleased how it worked, although we might redesign the angled plastic connectors as they turned out to be a bit fragile.

The system is designed to be a bit similar to mecano, with a series of different length bars with equally spaced holes in them, that can be joined together. The difference is ours is more suitable for younger children - the pieces are much larger, and instead of nuts and bolts our system uses some very clever plastic rivets. These simply push into the hole, and expand to lock the two holes together - much easier for children to use. They can also be pushed back out from the other side of the hole, and reused as many times as you like. Combined with a series of small plastic brackets, the bars and rivets can be used to make all manner of creations that are quite large in scale very quickly.

Many thanks to all the human guinea pigs who helped out!

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!)

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).

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!