Tech Camp Blog

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.

We spent today at IBM Hursley, one of IBM's biggest sites in the UK, helping them test out some educational games they were working on. They wanted a bunch of kids to help them with their testing and we were happy to oblige now that the big summer events are all over.

Twenty six planes all built, and all in the air! Twenty five came down (pretty much) intact. This is Greg just before the maiden flight. Sadly this one went straight in a tree but we were able to retrieve it today with the help of some very long ladders, poles, and the helpful people at Ufton Court.

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.

Last day at our Brockhurst Tech Camp today and the children have been adding "mods" to their laser guns. Most popular were extensions to the stocks and improvements to the sights (more aesthetic than functional, but they looked cool). I'm so often impressed by the kid's creativity, and what they can come up with given a few bits of pipe, some foam board and some glue!

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.

An exciting day today; Tech Camp has taken on it's first employee (well, sort of ...) Jack has been a Tech Camp regular for several years now and has convinced me to take him on for a year as an intern/gap-year student. I'm really looking forward to working with Jack; he is not your regular 18 year old ...

Just finishing up at the Cheltenham Science Festival. We've had a great weekend. Tom has been running some "Light, Lasers and Illusions" workshops for the Family Programme, and Jack & Felix have been running laser tag with the public in the gardens. Some of the locals were really geared-up for the tech tank, but even with full camouflage some of them still couldn't reach the trigger ...