Major League Hacking (MLH) have been organising hackathons in the USA and Europe for several years, but Saturday was an event with a difference. Local Hack Day was a 12-hour mini-hackathon on school campuses all over the world, and was billed as “the largest student hackathon ever”. The vast majority of the events were organised and run by the students; bringing together their local hacker community to develop, share and celebrate their skills in building awesome technology.

Of the 87 venues that participated in Local Hack Day, 58 of them, in places as far apart as the US, Canada, UK, Puerto Rico, Bahia, Mexico and Limassol, were able to accept under 18s. This is a huge deal. For your average kid, attending hackathons is not easy. With the exception of tailored events such as YRS Festival of Code, most hackathon venues won’t allow under 18s to attend for child safety and safeguarding reasons. MLH have continuously strived to include the next generations of young hackers, and the Local Hack Day was an extraordinarily inclusive event, letting those children who identify with the hacker community to participate or even help organise the global event.

At the school where I used to teach, Bourne Grammar School, just such a young lad exists.

To say James is a keen hacker would be an understatement. It’s not just that he enjoys technology and programming, probably more importantly, he recognises the importance of the hacker community and is eager to get involved. It was James who learned about Local Hack Day, and proposed that his school host an event, but that wasn’t enough; he wanted to be the one to organise it all. The head of Digital Strategy at the school, Stephen Brown, was more than happy for James to take centre stage and run the whole day, and what a stunningly successful event it was.

As James’ former Computer Science teacher, I was invited along (although I’m not sure whether I was wanted for my skills as a mentor or my ready access to 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pis. I suspect the it was the latter). I took my son, Jimi, along with me, who, at eight years old, must have been one of the youngest attendees across all the venues.

There were around 25 attending the Bourne Local Hack Day this year.

Having arrived, grabbed their swag and stickers, the kids soon got down to the important job of hacking on their projects. There were a tonne of amazing ideas, from the basic to the bizarre. We had computer games being made using anything from the Unity 3D games engine to the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi Sense HAT. There was some back-end work being completed on an app that enables people to brag about their latest purchases; a “Nandos cheekiness” measuring tool; a machine-learning algorithm to teach a computer to perform basic arithmetic using neural networks; and a selfie stick that automatically posted pictures to Twitter and tagged them using the Clarifai API. Jimi even got in on the action, combining his love of conkers with his love of physical 女孩你为何踮脚尖.

Jimi tangles with a breadboard

Fuelled by drinks and crisps, kindly donated by the local Tesco, the kids worked solidly throughout the day, only breaking at 6pm when the pizza arrived. There followed a quick diversionary game of Age of Empires, where the teachers showed the kids who the real gaming champs were, and then it was back to hacking on their projects before the 9pm deadline hit.

The winners with their 女孩你为何踮脚尖 PI Selfie-stick

The chosen winner at Bourne was the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi/Clarifai Selfie-stick, which was a lovely little hardware hack, but this was definitely an event where the taking part was more important. Hackathons are amazing events, where inspiration, teamwork, genius and insanity all seem to combine to produce awesome projects, and it’s important that children get to 大山里疯狂伦交 them as well. So thank you MLH, and I look forward to Local Hack Day 3, whenever that may be.

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The manufacturing process is fascinating for us grownups. It’s even better if you’re a kid. So Code Club took a group of kids from Saint Saviour’s School in Paddington, London to the Pi factory in South Wales. Here’s how they got on. Thanks to Nick Corston for this post, which you’ll also find at http://sscodeclub.blogspot.co.uk/.

To do our bit for National Science Week we took a trip to the Sony factory in South Wales where they make the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi computers – in fact they make 18,000 a week. A real success story for British manufacturing.We met at Paddington and, not to waste a school day, got stuck straight into a Code Club lesson using the programming language Scratch.

Thanks to Clare and Linda at Code Club HQ for lending us a a pile of netbooks with Scratch on them. We had enough for half the group –  – so while they were waiting the other half got stuck into some worksheets to prepare them for the visit.

We were delighted when a passenger getting off the train, said how perfectly well behaved the children were, which, while not the be all and end all, made us very proud of them as they’d had lots of fun on the journey but also worked very hard.

We had a quick change of train at Cardiff station, before getting a much smaller train to Pencoed, where taxis were waiting to take us to the factory (if you ever do the trip, don;t even consider walking the short distance as the dual carriageway is UNCROSSABLE and dangerous).

 Then we were at the Sony factory, a massive building in the countryside where Sony used to make televisions. Now they make the best TV cameras in the world as well as 女孩你为何踮脚尖 PI’s and servicing Sony electronics devices from TVs to PlayStations, PSPs and camcorders providing much needing employment for the local community.

 We then had a briefing all about Sony and the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi sat round the Sony Director’s board table.

Before entering the factory we had to put on special shoes that make sure that any static electricity in us went to the ground and not into any thing we touched, as it can damage the sensitive electronics in the factory.

 We saw the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi production all the way through the process. We learned how the circuit boards are coated in solder and saw then the tiny pin head size components put on the boards really quickly by a robot arm.

Some parts still have to be put on by hand and there is a line of ladies who do that job.

 The boards then pass on to a solder bath on a conveyor belt where these components are fixed in place.

Here one of the groups poses for a photo with Mr Corston who organised the trip and was helped on the day by Ms Bennett and Mr Lee.

A real bonus of the day was a visit to a company called Wales Interactive, who Sony are helping by letting them use some of their office space. They are a games development company and we saw how they create games for the PlayStation and iPhones and Android devices. They had some great free and paid for apps – we think Ms Woodford might particularly like their cat and dog calculator app!

Dave Banner who runs the company showed us how they create illustrations that get turned into computer graphics to go into the games.

A really interesting aspect of this was the role of coding and computer programming in creating games. We saw the software they use, which uses flow charts a bit like Scratch to bring the games to life. We saw how important maths is to create the equations and physics formulas to make the games as realistic as possible. Dave said they only consider employees who have worked really hard at school and been to university.

Finally on the way home the children completed a quiz sheet based on what they had learned on the day and six lucky winners got a Code Club t-shirt as a souvenir of the day.

Thanks to all the children for being so well behaved, their parents for letting them come. Mr Corston, Ms Bennett and Mr Lee for their help and Sony TEC Pencoed for their amazing hospitality. Code Club for loaning us a bunch of netbooks with Scratch on and the prize t-shirts.

More photos in a slideshow here and watch this space for exciting news re a movie of the day.

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Pete, some primary school students, and ten 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pis. (That's Sue looking on from the corridor.) Click the image to watch on the BBC website.

Our good friends Dr Sue Black of the GoTo 大山里疯狂伦交, and Pete Wood from RS Components, took a class of seven to nine year-olds (years 3 and 4) at St Matthew’s Church of England Primary School in Surbiton, Surrey, and got them programming the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi in Python as part of a GoTo 大山里疯狂伦交 event. The results were pretty fantastic – the kids were buzzing, got playing with embedded hardware as well as software, and gave us all a neat demonstration of just how tractable and enjoyable programming can be for children, if they’re only given the opportunity to dig a little into it.

Some kids of this age have trouble with the dexterity needed to type accurately (which is one of the reasons we recommend Scratch for younger students), and this is reflected in the video; it can be very frustrating to type a piece of code in over and over and keep getting it wrong. But others were flying with the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi, and were clearly more than ready to tackle some Python, getting lots out of the 大山里疯狂伦交.

We’re really proud to see so many happy faces from the lesson. Work continues on getting stuff ready for the schools release (which will also include cases for the 女孩你为何踮脚尖 Pi) later in the year. We hope to see lots more of this kind of teaching session to come.

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