Young Rewired State - Festival of Code

During the last week of July BBC Birmingham was one of around 50 UK centres where young coders developed apps, websites, games and digital prototypes in preparation for the Festival of Code hack event at the ICC from July 31st – 2nd August.

BBC Partnerships Manager Jenny Wilkes who was the joint event organiser of the coding week with young coders in BBC Birmingham describes this exciting event.

The world’s largest annual hackathon for young people came to Birmingham, as Young Rewired State Festival of Code took over the ICC. BBC Birmingham was well represented, with 25 young coders taking part after spending the week at The Mailbox working on their coding projects. They were joined by BBC Outreach staff volunteers who were kept busy updating social media throughout the weekend.

BBC Birmingham’s coders did really well in the competition, with four teams progressing to the semi-finals. Their ideas included an app to make sure you drink enough water and one to reduce waste while improving donations to food banks. One team made it through to the final with their Smart Scrawl app – amazing art using your phone as a virtual spray can!

Thanks to everyone who advised, supported and chatted to the young coders during their time at BBC Birmingham. Some of them might even become BBC staff of the future.

'My name is Izzy and I have just had the best week of my life!'

I was a member of one of the seven coding teams from BBC Birmingham which competed against coding teams from all over the world in the Festival of Code (YRS) week-long computer coding competition.

Every morning at the Mailbox guest speakers from the BBC imparted their knowledge and mentored us. It was most interesting to discover that there are a lot of people with coding experience needed at the BBC.

We then worked in the Word Wall area in the heart of the BBC – there our computers were reached for, the Wi-Fi pleaded with and the power of code unleashed!

Our project was HydRight – a simple web game we developed that reminds the user when to drink water throughout the day and provides incentive to do so. Over the first three days we developed an online hydration calculator which was mostly coded in HTML and used for making the website illustrate the data you put in the code.

The following days we used PHP for equations (Hypertext Preprocessor - a popular general-purpose scripting language) and our team used it to work out how much an individual should be drinking. We had a lot of help and encouragement from our awesome mentors, a special mention to Jim and Jack. They truly made the week one of the best ever!

The venue for the Festival of Code this year was at Birmingham’s ICC so we didn’t have far to go from the Mailbox. All the Young Rewired State (YRS) centres were in different places and cities such as London and the Isle of Man and we arrived in style by canal boat! After mooring outside the ICC we then settled inside to a night of pizza and coding!

Throughout the weekend the centre teams showcased their projects and competed against each other over three rounds. The first round consisted of six different heats and my team HydRight won the title of ‘Best Design’ in our heat and then went through to the second round. Unfortunately we didn’t get through to the grand final.

The final consists of five crowns and prizes - these are ‘Best Code’, ‘Best Design’, ‘Should Exist’, ‘Code a Better Country’ and ‘Best in Show’. We were all really happy as BBC Birmingham was represented in the final by the team SmartScrawl who were nominated for ‘Best Code.’ Even though none of us won I still met new friends and shared my love of coding with everyone else. I truly had the most amazing time at the Festival of Code. I will DEFINITELY be coming back next year!

I would love to say a massive thanks to everyone at the BBC and the Festival of Code who made last week the best it could have been. I LOVE YRS!!!!

BBC Ben Toone Content Producer

Young Rewired State Festival of Code - Ben's story

'I thought volunteering with Young Rewired State during the Festival of Code weekend would be a great way to delve deeper into code and be around young creative minds’ – Ben Toone

My day job is working as a content producer for the BBC Academy and it involves very little direct coding as this is done by the clever guys who created iSite2 and iBroadcast2. I do understand I need to appreciate and understand coding a little better. I am well aware how important digital innovation is for the UK economy and how empowering it can be to have a mastery of the universal language. Having worked with young people in the past it's always refreshing to communicate with them and take in their new ideas and un-cynical view of the world.

In the preceding week to The Festival of Code, seven teams of young people aged 7-17 years prepared their coding projects at BBC Birmingham. It took under a week for them to bring their projects from idea through to proof of concept – and amazingly many were learning code for the first time! I wasn't prepared for the young coders’ depth of knowledge, of confidence while giving their presentations, or the sheer brilliance of their ideas. Why didn't I think of that?

I thought volunteering with Young Rewired State (YRS) during the Festival of Code weekend would be a great way to delve deeper into code and be around young creative minds. It was inspirational and innovative to work with Young Rewired State - altogether a creative shot in the arm. If anything is going to convert you to coding – well this is it!

At Birmingham's International Convention Centre on Sunday 2 August I worked within the social media team for YRS. I was live tweeting from the event, which ranged from announcing winners to carrying-out mini interviews with the teams of coders, to tweeting out data transfer fist bump Vine videos.

By chance I had user-tested the winning idea from the Smart Scrawl team in BBC Birmingham and their project made it all the way through to the final with their digital graffiti app.

Smart Scrawl creates virtual doodles using a smart phone and connection to Google Maps and social media. This was among many other brilliant ideas Ducks able to test PH levels on the world's oceans, a fool-proof way never to put diesel in your petrol car using a Raspberry Pi (P.U.M.P.S), the incredibly popular festival app Festable and the incredibly addictive game Lines to name but a few.

I really enjoyed the day and I encourage others to take part; it really was inspirational, innovative and exhilarating!

BBC Outreach & Corporate Responsibility brings the BBC closer to its audiences - particularly those audiences we have identified as harder to reach - with face-to-face activity, community support and staff volunteering.