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What happened when Cramlington Learning Village visited us?
It was a bright summer’s day when we opened our office doors to 30 students from Cramlington Learning Village. Excited to get started, they flooded in, collected their blue visitor badges and settled in with juice and biscuits. They embarked upon Reflective Thinking’s office as they had chosen programming as their topic in ‘Project Fortnight’, in which their aim was to develop a piece of software to showcase at the Exhibition Day.
Visiting on the third day of their project, their teachers Jonathan Rooney and Paul Robson wanted them to have an insight into how making applications is done professionally.
Paul Robson, an I.C.T. teacher who organised the trip said: “The visit was an excellent experience for the learners and most of them put it as a high point over the two weeks. They enjoyed having a go at Digital Mysteries and could see how that would be useful for students to use in school.
“They enjoyed looking at the code and seeing how this was developed. They often talked about some of the principles they had picked up and how it might apply to their own projects. Would definitely come back again even if could bring a smaller group of students to see what the reflective thinking team are doing.”
To demonstrate what is involved, the benefits of using apps and to give motivation to build their own, we delivered three rotational mini workshops on:
The basic development of the classic game ‘Snake’, An under the hood look at the source code of a trading software product with Software Developer Steven Teal such as Digital Mysteries, with Director Ahmed Kharrufa
The use of Digital Mysteries on a tabletop, with Marketing and Sales Officer Natalie Taylor
As mentioned, the trip was part of Cramlington’s Project Fortnight which takes inspiration from High Tech High schools in California, whose staff have toured the UK to promote project-based learning.
During the fortnight, which takes place every year, 1000 students and 100 staff work on 50 projects varying from programming to bake days to a 'Dogs with jobs' calendar shoot and magazine.
We had a great day meeting the students and their teaching staff, here are some more pictures of the day:
Question and answer session Rotational workshops Working on Digital Mysteries 
