Skip to main content

Nor(DEV):con 2017 School conference day


Norfolk Developers are excited to announce their programme for Nor(DEV):con’s schools day, put together by Paul Foster, Microsoft in consultation with many members of faculty from different schools across Norfolk & Norfolk Developers themselves.

09:00 Arrival/Opening keynote segment (20 Minutes allowing for arrivals)

09.20 Paul Grenyer & Paul Foster Open event

09.25 Keynote- “Whoops”, and other classic programming phases by Dom Davis, (@Idomdavis).

Schools now teach algorithms and programming from the age of 5, so it’s hardly rocket science. Except when it is. And even when it isn’t it goes wrong a lot. I should know, I’ve been responsible for some of that wrongness. The trick is to learn from your mistakes, and to make sure that when it goes wrong, it does so in a way that no one will notice, and definitely not in the ways I’m going to spend this session talking about.

10:00 break

10:25 Guided technology task (2 hour activity)

In this activity students will learn how to blend software and hardware to build a modern digital device. Working in pairs, students will learn how the internet of things uses sensors and actuators to build intelligent feedback systems that can interact with the real world.

12:30 Lunch. (Allocated 1 hour)

Lunch is not provided.

A loop of inspirational technology videos will run during the lunch break to give students further ideas.

13:30 STEM student challenge (3 hour activity)

The STEM Student Challenge aims to help students connect the dots between the STEM subjects they study today and the impact those subjects could have on their ability to be part of the next generation of technology heroes. We invite students to use their knowledge of STEM subjects and marry it with research and creativity to imagine and depict their vision of technology in 2027.

The challenge is open to teams of 4-6 students in years 10 to 13. The challenge is to select one of the following categories and come up with an original technology idea that could exist in that field in 10 years’ time.

  • Artificial intelligence and virtual reality
  • Data Security
  • Healthcare

Students must depict or “pitch” their idea in the form of a two-minute video.

1. Form a team. Teams should be made up of 4-6 students.

2. Choose a category and start imagining! We’re surrounded by technology, whether it’s in our pockets, our homes or our schools, and it’s only going to become more central to our daily lives. Microsoft is working in areas that will change the way we work, play and look after ourselves and we want you to think about how these might look 10 years from now. So choose from one of the categories below, and get to work – come up with an original idea for a future technology. Challenge entries should reflect your team’s creativity and your knowledge of your chosen category.

You are part of the generation that will help bring the technologies of 2027 to fruition, so in doing this challenge, we hope you’ll think more about how you can be part of driving the exciting world of tomorrow’s technology. Each team should choose one category and submit one idea only.

3. Create a video. Create a video that depicts your idea. The tech doesn’t exist yet, so you’ll have to get creative! Make a science show, do a skit, demo a mock up prototype using available materials – just keep it under two minutes. Please make sure that your team is familiar with the judging criteria which you can find in this document.

4. Submit your entry. Upload your video to OneDrive by 16:20

Video Entry Judging Criteria

1. Originality of idea Does the technology idea show creative thinking? Does it stand out from the crowd? Is the idea unique and original?

2. Quality of research methods Have the team shown the research that they have undertaken to lead them to their technology idea? Does the video demonstrate that the team has researched and understood the category they have chosen?

3. Understanding of STEM subjects How well does the video entry demonstrate a sound knowledge in one or more STEM subjects?

4. Quality of presentation and clarity of idea Is the video well presented, clearly describing the future technology idea? Have the team presented their idea in a creative, interesting and entertaining way?

5. Is it feasible? Have the students demonstrated how their technology idea could be possible in the year 2027?

6. Evaluation of the process Have the team demonstrated what they’ve learned from the experience of coming up with their technology idea?

7. Judging will occur after the event with schools being notified of results by the end of February

16:30 Close (dependent on lunch break length and required school departure time)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv

Bloodstock 2009

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th