global digital creativity research & workshops

Hal MacLean and myself joined the BBC Blast Truck in White City to in the lead facilitation role working with young people from the London Region on Digital Creativity projects. Hal and I spent two days of the event working with a group of budding young enthusiasts interested in a career in television. We demonstrated to them the technologies before undertaking a tough filming task. On the first day of White City we were joined by Ultralab’s Colin Elsey and co-Blast Lead Facilitator Hamish Scott-Brown who brought the young people from the Anglia Ruskin Summer School for a day on the truck undertaking an Animation task.

King Harold School’s Malcolm Burnett arranged for a bus load of his young people, spending their time between the truck events and the BBC’s 21CC Creativity Centre.

A huge amount of BBC staff were about for the three day event, in particular a strong presence of BBC mentors…. that’s people that work for the BBC helping the young people with advice.

The final day was completed with a big celebration of music, film and dance attended by well over 100 people. A great time was had by all.

Richard Millwood, Director of Ultralab joined the finale event and filmed the performances from one of the live cameras. Iona Walters, friend of Ultralab from ‘Input CBBC’ project days was also in attendance filming the dance participants in action. It was also great to see Gail Taylor, who was part of the Ultralab ‘Online Soap’ project back in 2002 (read more about it on this site), Gail now works for the BBC on mobile telephone projects and will be joining the Blast Truck when it arrives in Bristol, as a mentor.

Click to view some of the pictures taken at the event.

The past two days have been a huge success for the young people from King Harold School who have been working with their partner feeder Primary School’s to engage some of the younger pupils in a fun filled Animation fest. The Summer School was run entirely by year 9, 10 and 11 pupils. All equipment was loaned by Ultralab.

Ultralab are proud to work with King Harold School who continue to pioneer in the field of Digital Creativity, investing heavily in the power of creative technology to engage and enhance the learning journeys of its pupils.

Click to see the pictures taken during the Summer School.

Here is the completed work:

 Alien Invasion: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Crush: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Dory: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Simpsons: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Squashed Bee: Play Now | Play in Popup

Ultralab has a long working history with the pupils and staff at King Harold School of Waltham Abbey, Essex. For the past four years pupils of King Harold School have been involved in Ultralab’s Summer School programme. However, this summer the pupils will instead run a Summer School of their own Summer School for pupils of the Primary Partners Schools who feed King Harold each year with new students. King Harold’s pupils will run the entire event themselves.

A team of students from King Harold arrived at Ultralab to spend the afternoon with Ultralab’s Hal MacLean to plan and discuss the activities which would be running on the Primary Summer School. Hal is a former Primary Head Teacher and assisted the young people with experience working with the younger age groups. Malcolm Burnett from King Harold School is overseeing the project, pictures and completed animation work will be posted on this site soon.

Hal MacLean, myself and Director of Ultralab, Richard Millwood from the Ultralab team at Anglia Ruskin University spent the afternoon and evening with the BBC Blast team in White City’s Media Centre, London to share and celebrate with the wider BBC the progress made by Blast, the BBC’s creative platform giving kids a place to be creative.  Malcolm Burnett and two students from King Harold School supported the event by demonstrating creative Animation work to the BBC audience.

Ultralab’s SMS wall of stickies was available, developed by Alexander Blanc, the underpinning SMS system ‘UltraSMS’ developed by Tim Ellis.

Click here to view the pictures.

On the 26th of January 2006 eight creative learners from King Harold School worked in Ultralab at Anglia Ruskin University with researchers Hal MacLean and Matthew Eaves to further their skills with Final Cut Pro, a computer application to create and edit visual material.

The young people at King Harold School work closely with the Ultralab on projects using technology for creative purpose, recently supporting Ultralab at the BETT education show in London this January providing the young people to work on the stand and demonstrate new technologies and how they could be applied in classroom teaching.

The objective of the training day was to begin the process of learning how to manipulate the footage to create visually appealing programmes suitable for television. King Harold School is an innovative school which is always looking for new ways to broaden learning opportunities for it students to enable, include and encourage work on real world projects and innovations prior to employment.

Ultralab works with many schools nationwide, promoting how technology can be used to creative purpose in the classroom, Ultralab is working closely with the school to develop new ways of working together in a pilot which will see young people move involved in project based learning while exploring the potential of a future at University.

Click here to view the pictures from the day.

The Ultralab team works each year on the ‘Create at BETT’ stand at the BETT show. The show is attended by 26,000 visitors each year and has over 2000 stands. The Create at BETT stand is supported by Apple Computer and staffed by Ultralab. Our friends from BBC Blast joined the stand for the first year to promote young peoples creativity.

Ultralab’s partner schools King Harold School and Saffron Walden County High School assisted on the stand providing young people to demonstrate to the visitors podcasting, animation, sound and vision technologies.

Jane Down from the Ultralab team spent BETT working in the NAACE Lounge demonstrating Podcasting to NAACE members.

View the pictures from the show.

 Watch a movie from the BETT 2006 show: Play Now | Play in Popup
 Watch another movie from the BETT 2006 show: Play Now | Play in Popup

Today, (Saturday) Maureen Gurr and myself headed to London to the BBC Broadcasting House bringing together the young people from Saffron Walden County High School and King Harold School for the planning day for ‘Create at BETT 2006.

For the past five years Ultralab have been working in conjunction with Apple Computer and other partners to deliver the ‘Create at BETT’ feature at BETT, the educational technology show at Olympia in London (11 - 14 January 2006).

The BETT Show attracted 24,000 visitors last year, the ‘Create at BETT’ stand is one of the few stands which does not actually sell anything, it is purely there to demonstrate how creative young people can be with technology.

Considering that people under the age of 18 are not allowed into the show, it is great that ‘Create at BETT’ continues to be the only stand fully staffed by young people ‘being creative’, the idea is that visitors will leave the show with creative ideas to take back to their institutions to move creative use of technology forward.

BBC Blast! are involved in the project this year, our training day for the young people involved took place at the BBC’s 21CC (21st Century Classroom) facility at broadcasting house.

On the stand the young people will be demonstrating film, sound, podcasting and animation technologies, all surrounded by an EastEnders theme. BBC EastEnders will be the focus of new script ideas, model animations of classic scenes and the challenge to create a new theme tune sequence for the show.

Both involved schools, friends of Ultralab’s Digital Creativity projects will be sending sixteen children to the show between them. The young people will stay in London with Ultralab.

Maureen Gurr, Richard Millwood, Kris Popat and Matthew Eaves will be representing Ultralab for the duration of the event on the ‘Create at BETT stand’.