Last week the BBC Birmingham building was one of many centres to generously host small groups of young developers as part of the Young Rewired State Festival of Code.
This is a national, week-long event for under 18s; teams are formed in regional centres and have to code something involving “open data”, before travelling to the festival on the Friday and presenting their creations to all of the other participants and a panel of judges.
We had very little experience in coding outside of school but decided to sign up out of curiosity, and definitely do not regret it!
Our first day started with introductions and a tour of the building. We were given a great insight to the workings of the BBC and made to feel at home, helped greatly by the endless supply of biscuits and juice.
We naturally split into two teams and began brainstorming ideas for our project. Fortunately we came up with one pretty quickly and started working out how to approach the problem at hand, while occasionally glancing at the plans of the other team who seemed intent on somehow making a boat but ended up with an internet enabled coat hook.
Young people working on their projects for Festival of Code at BBC Birmingham
Throughout the week we were introduced to many interesting people from both BBC Birmingham and London, such as a web expert who gave us advice on setting up a website for displaying some statistics from our project and two guys who took us down to the basement to show us the future of local radio
Young people at a workshop as part of Festival of Code at BBC Birmingham
A particular highlight was one lunchtime when we were invited to sit in the gallery and watch the lunchtime Midlands Today program being broadcast live.
On Friday, day five, we arrived under the weight of overnight bags and sleeping bags ready for a (little did we know at the time) seven hour last-minute-coding coach to Plymouth – the prospect of which was greatly improved by Jim's unveiling of a box of bright yellow BBC outreach t shirts for us all!
Young people in front of the TARDIS at BBC Birmingham
The weekend in Plymouth went past fast and we all had a great time. We didn’t win anything but we learnt a lot along the way and got to meet a whole bunch of cool people.
Our fellow BBC Birmingham group made it to the finals for “Best in show”- to our delight - as their project was an excellent demonstration of hard-work and innovative thinking as well as being one of the only hardware-hacks entered this year.
An internet-enabled coat hook which tells the user which coat matches the weather.
We certainly won’t miss the opportunity to go next year and are now extremely motivated to start new projects and show off our progress at the BBC Birmingham coding club.
BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility connects the BBC directly with audiences, especially those we often find harder to reach. This helps us understand better what all of our audiences want and expect from our content. It supported the Festival of Code project in Birmingham, which connected BBC volunteers with young people aged 10 – 18.
