This week I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Schoolhouse Festival of Play this week! I was lucky enough to be able to take my oldest son along for the day which was filled with lots of his (and my) favourite things; game design, basic engineering and coding!
The highlight of the day for my son was designing his own game, delivered by Into Games; they provided an excellent framework that enables young people to think about all aspects of their game and design the various aspects step-by-step. He loved this so much that he even continued planning his game on the train and had me tinkering with some of the game’s mechanics at the same time on my laptop!
A projection-mapped, pop-up book from Alastair Low was another highlight in which we were able to build our own page of a pop-up book, then map out the obstacles using software from LowTek Games.
Our final session was a really interesting overview of machine learning by Dale Lane, creator of the tool, Machine Learning for Kids, this enables you to introduce machine learning in a user-friendly way by training your model or using pre-existing models then bringing this into a modified version of Scratch.
We really enjoyed finishing the day by looking around the exhibition area, and of course it’s always lovely to bump into the Flip Computing team too!
If you’re interested in an action-packed day of STEM learning for your school next summer, I highly recommend you take a look at next year’s conference, most of the young people attending were part of a school trip. You need to book early, as I’m pretty sure they sold out of tickets!