News

Two young people from DigiLocal succeed at NASA International Space Apps Challenge

by

Since 2012 NASA have sponsored the annual International Space Apps Challenge. The event runs over a weekend in October where teams from across the globe address challenges set by NASA. They have unique access to NASA expertise and offers from selected Global Collaborators.

DigiLocal has taken part since we hosted 15 young people at the 2019 event, in partnership with the UWE Space Exploration Society.

This year the Challenge topic was ‘Take Action’. It was also the first fully online and virtual event because of the Coronavirus pandemic. This meant that while we would be co-hosting the Bristol event again with the UWE Space Exploration Society, we would also be participating with the rest of the UK (and global) participants.

The event is not run as a ‘young persons’ event. There were two challenges designed for younger participants but there was no age bracketing for the judges when considering the final submissions.

Everyone joined the Discord server on Friday evening on the 2 Oct and began swapping ideas for which challenges they’d like to take part in. As teams began to form we made sure that all our young people were able to engage and participate, offering occasional ‘translation’ services for the acronyms and technical terms being used.

At 9am on Saturday 3 Oct the event officially launched in the UK with a special live stream video with the NASA Global Organisers.

From then it was a near constant stream of activity from idea storming with online collaborative whiteboard tools, to setting up and testing cloud computing resources, to producing the final presentation packs used for the judging. Teams had access to some fantastic offers from the Global Collaborators that included free credits on Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and IBM.

At 5pm on Sunday 4 Oct we had 4 teams from DigiLocal presenting their ideas to the Bristol judges. We were honoured this year to have Prof Chris Toomer and Dr Yaseen Zaidi from the University of the West of England. Dr John Bradford from DigiLocal was the third judge.

View of demo BioEnterprise App

Space Racers addressed the ‘Create a Mascot’ challenge with Gilda the Astronaut (coded in Scratch). A fun flamingo to introduce nebula, black holes, and other space phenomena! The Trapz built a game in roblox for the ‘Orbital Scrap Metal Game’ challenge. You were a stranded astronaut on Mars who had to clear a safe passage, and build new items, for an incoming rescue ship from Earth. Project Mars build a communications app to simulate the challenges of communicating with people on Mars, as part of the ‘Can you hear me now?’ challenge. This featured a variable time delay on messages so you could train how to react to situations, and experience the psychological challenges of a conversation with delays of between 4 and 24 minutes (depending on the positions of Earth and Mars).

BioEnterprise addressed the ‘Scanning for Lifeforms’ challenge. They proposed a game that would use satellite data to build a model of biodiversity change over time for different regions of the plant. They would then overlay this with business data to develop a model of how business actives impacted biodiversity. Players of the game would be able make business choices in a traditional business building game, but would see the predicted impact of those decisions on the biodiversity.

This would help inform them of how local decisions have global consequences.

Data was drawn from NOAA website and analysed in IBM DataPak, with visualisation using NASA’s own panopoly package. The plan was to work with the Watson Studio to develop the machine learning package but they ran out of time.

AerosOx were the fifth team from Bristol, comprising 2 post-grad researchers, a post-doc academic, an NHS Innovation Lead, and a business consultant. They tackled the ‘One Health Approach’ challenge by mapping air quality satellite data to prescribing for respiratory illnesses.

AerosOx and BioEnterprise were put forward for the Global Judging, with the final announcement in January 2021!

We wish both teams (but especially 13 yr old Thomas and 12 yr old Primrose from BioEnterprise) the very best of luck in the global judging.

Note:

Running a national, indeed an international, event online raises some serious safeguarding issues but in the months leading up to the event we discussed how to configure the Discord server so that we could provide young people with private and secure channels to use. We also ensured we had DBS cleared volunteers present and online throughout the event. A specific document was sent to all parents of potential young participants on how to configure the privacy setting on Discord. Finally, we issued a very clear Code of Conduct as part of the UK server that, while not specifically mentioning young people, made it very clear what was considered acceptable (and not acceptable) behaviour online.

DigiLocal @ St Pauls Carnival 2020

by

The global COVID-19 pandemic closed the street party, but couldn’t stop Carnival!

Since its beginnings back in 1968, St Pauls has grown in size and reputation to become one of Bristol’s biggest attractions. Crossing generations through a celebration of Afro Caribbean culture, it is an event where every float, every stage, every performer and every person tells a story – and that story is how music and dance and community can bring people together.

In the weeks leading up to Carnival we put out the invitation for young people to design their own dancers and floats for St Pauls Carnival 2020. Working with Elisabetta (our graphics intern from City of Bristol College) we developed some original templates and new backgrounds for the parade.

We had loads of great submissions and the final projects were played as part of the community films between the main music sets. It was great to see how different young people interpreted Carnival and included images and flags from their cultures. The young people also had great fun animating their dancers!

It was a fantastic experience working with the Carnival team and we’re really looking forward to an even bigger and better virtual component to next year’s St Pauls Carnival!

You can find our dedicated Scratch channel for the carnival with the project file.

The whole event was streamed live on twitch.

To make these movies available for everyone we’ve also saved them to our YouTube channel.

Bristol young people on the International Space Station!

by

Every year the European Space Agency, with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, sponsor a challenge for young people to write a short python programme to be run on the International Space Station (ISS).

Two specially hardened Raspberry Pi’s have been flown up to the ISS and are in orbit around the planet. The code that young people write is checked to make sure it runs, lasts for less than 30 seconds, and makes use of the various sensors on the Raspberry Pi. It is then sent to the ISS where it is run for the astronauts to see and learn from.

Between January and February BC (Before Coronavirus) we had 18 teams from DigiLocal clubs across the region taking part. They joined nearly 6,500 other teams from across the EU region.

Last year I printed out certificates and awarded them to young people at their clubs. Obviously we can’t do that this year, so I’ve emailed the parents with their child’s certificate.

Each certificate includes their name and their team name, and on the reverse an image of the Earth with the path of the ISS showing the exact location when their programme ran!

And, yes, I’ve checked and the maps are all different.

This year’s teams included:

  • Red Saints
  • Potato People
  • BACON
  • Gryffindor Hogwarts
  • Team Wilburtron mk9
  • epicspaceyesokcoolmeow
  • Space Smiley Face
  • Space Girls
  • Apples
  • yeetfest
  • Potato Squad
  • M&M’s
  • Time Stones
  • epic gamers
  • space
  • Cool Guys On Devices Engineering
  • Team Girls
  • Space Potatoes

Congratulations to everyone that took part and had their code on the International Space Station!

DigiLocal to deliver computers to disadvantaged children during pandemic with funding support from Quartet Coronavirus Response Fund

by

Digilocal, a Bristol charity charged with supporting young people in learning digital skills, has been awarded a £2,500 grant by the Quartet Coronavirus Response Fund. The grant will support its work to supply laptops to families within Bristol, so that children can have the digital equipment to engage in home learning. 

Rishita on her DigiLocal laptop

Digilocal has been operating in the West of England for the past five years, becoming a charity in 2019. It seeks to bring digital skills to the heart of communities, operating free to attend coding clubs for children within over 14 local community centres. The clubs are run by a team of volunteers, with equipment which is usually transported from site to site throughout the week. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Digilocal has been lending its computers out to children across the region to use for home schooling. The charity has also been running sessions online every weekday evening for children who want to learn coding skills. 

Charity CEO John Bradford commented “Many of the young people who attend our clubs show enormous talent, and develop digital skills really quickly, but with the lock-down many of them have become digitally excluded, not just from our sessions but from the wide variety of online resources available. We instantly recognised the need to get computer equipment out to those households and we are delighted to have helped dozens of local children. We would love to do even more, it’s fantastic to have Quartet support this work.”

The laptop Digilocal provided to Rishita has made a significant contribution towards Rishita’s progress through Python coding and Scratch.’

Rishita’s father

The Quartet Coronavirus Response Fund grant programme aims to support local activities that are helping communities affected by the Coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. It offers local charitable and community organisations emergency funding to support emerging challenges faced within local communities as a result of the continuing threat of Coronavirus.

About Digilocal

DigiLocal® is an independent registered charity (Reg: 1185746) for the public benefit, to advance the education of young people in the UK from groups that are under-represented within the technology industry, in particular but not exclusively, by supporting free technology clubs. It supports communities to run free tech clubs for their young people. Its mission is to support a tech club for young people with every community in the UK that would like to provide one. The charity was founded in 2019, having previously operated as part of the High Tech Bristol and Bath CIC since 2015.

Download .txt Press Release

Download image of Rishita

Fifteen young people reach new heights with NASA data!

by

Over the weekend of 19/20 October 2019, fifteen young people from 6 DigiLocal clubs took part in the NASA-led International Space Apps Challenge.

Since its inception in 2012, NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge has become the world’s largest global hackathon, engaging thousands of citizens across the globe to use NASA’s open data to build innovative solutions to challenges we face on Earth and in space.

Space Apps inspires local communities to come together, think intensely, and create solutions to important problems. Each year, Space Apps engages thousands of individuals in cities around the world to work with NASA’s open source data in a 48-hour sprint. Teams of technologists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, artists, and others collaborate to answer some of the most pressing challenges on Earth and in space.

A special thanks has to go to Alex (President, UWE Space Exploration Society) for welcoming us to the Student’s Union building and hosting some very excited young people (and a few very excited volunteer mentors)! It was a great honour for our young people to join the UWE students and industry participants in this 2-day challenge.

Our young people tackled the challenges of how to;

  • spot and communicate wild fires in remote parts of the globe,
  • get cheap internet to the remote oceans,
  • gamify the clearance of space junk,
  • gamify deep space data through a ‘build a solar system workshop’,
  • explain and demonstrate the issue of marine pollution from plastics, and
  • use NASA earth data to educate people about our planet!

In the true spirit of hackathons and codejams, 5 of our young people stayed over night and were still coding into the early hours of the morning! The last laptop was turned off around 4:30 am. I don’t think the parents that came in to mind the overnight portion were expecting such enthusiasm and staying power from their 10 year olds.

Sunday morning found the young people up and coding at the break of dawn. Those that hadn’t stayed overnight returned at 9am eager to catch up and complete their projects.

Team Space Potatoes presenting their project

By the official close of the event (4pm Sunday, 20 Oct) we had a range of fantastic projects, accompanied by presentations and live demo’s!

All the young people did exceptionally well and many were awarded their Green or Orange LINKS Award wristbands in recognition of their achievements. Green wristbands are awarded for exceptional performance on an individual project, and Orange is awarded for exceptional performance in a group project.

The two nominated projects from Bristol for global judging were The Magic Music Box from Digital Bad, and Team Ember (Aarush, Alex, Ben, and Rishi) “Wildfire tracking in Indonesia” in the Spot that fire V2.0 challenge. With three young people from three different DigiLocal clubs, this was a great example of what can be achieved in a codejam environment.

Two teams were put forward to the global judging, and two special awards were made locally. The first Special Commendation went to Team Space Potatoes (Dean, Jane, and Milly) “Create your dream solar system” in the Build a Planet challenge for their creativity and the original music score that they had composed to go with their game. The second went to Team Super Code (Zane) “Journey of the other kind” in the 1UP for NASA Earth challenge for his very confident presentation and knowledge about how he’d like to develop his game further.

Aarush (Team Ember) with his Certificate and some of their planning diagrams

Much of Saturday morning was spent planning how they would tackle the project and setting up their resources. Github and Discord were heavily used by all the teams, along with quite a bit of Stackoverflow!

Team Ember were also notable that they mostly used C# and php, two languages that aren’t part of the ‘normal’ projects we use at DigiLocal. Aarush and Rishi did exceptionally well to translate their python knowledge to these new languages in a remarkably short period of time.

Alongside the young people we had a fantastic team of 10 volunteers supporting everyone with advise and guidance. We also had parents invited for the presentations and awards ceremony.

Team Ember receiving their Orange LINKS Awards from DigiLocal CEO Dr John Bradford and Prof Chris Toomer (UWE, Judging panel)

It was a real honour to have been a small part in bringing this event together and we’re already planning for Space Apps Challenge 2020!

Graduation 2019!

by

DigiLocal is supporting the development of problem solving skills and building resilience in young people. We do this by supporting communities to run tech clubs for their young people.

We also encourage and celebrate participation in extra-curricular activities outside of school. The impact of these activities is proven to be positive which is why we’re committed to creating a level playing field of opportunity and opening up access to children of all backgrounds.

One of these celebrations is through the Children’s University.

The Children’s University is an international charity devoted to helping children discover the fascinating world around them, and appreciate the real-world relevance of their school subjects. We encourage 5–14 year olds to take part in all kinds of activities outside of school, so that they can develop new interests, learn new skills and enjoy new experiences.

We’ve been a registered Learning Destination since 2018 and had our first successful graduate in the class of ’19!

Since launching our clubs as Learning Destinations, we’ve signed up 12 young people from 5 different clubs and registered over 200 hours collectively!

Image courtesy of Bristol and South Gloucestershire Children’s University.

Mission Success!

by
Alex @ Barton Hill

Seven teams of young people across the region complete challenge to have their code run on computers in space!

Seven teams of young people from Bristol and the West have completed the AstroPi Mission Zero coding challenge. The challenge is a national programme which offers young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space by writing computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers aboard the International Space Station.

Neeti @ Bradley Stoke

The teams, with members aged from 8 to 14, were all members of DigiLocal, a charitable organisation which seeks to bring coding clubs into the heart of communities through a network of volunteer ambassadors. The challenge was running from February this year, with teams submitting entries based on the Python computer coding language that were developed during DigiLocal club sessions. 

This year 5,677 entries were received from the 24 ESA member/associate member states, with 4,621 being run on the International Space Station.  The certificates of completion were awarded to the seven teams throughout the region in June. Each certificate includes the team name, and a fantastic map on the back with the actual location of the ISS when that team’s program ran.

“We’re enormously proud of the hard work these teams have demonstrated. Giving young people access to opportunities they wouldn’t get elsewhere is key to DigiLocal. We do this by supporting communities to run tech clubs for those young people.”

Dr John Bradford, CEO of DigiLocal
Sara & Naby @ Docklands, St Pauls

The AstroPi challenge was part of British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake’s mission Principia (2015–2016) on the ISS. The UK Space Agency and the Raspberry Pi Foundation collaborated to foster young people’s interest in space science and to help them develop computing and digital making skills. For this purpose, two space-hardened Raspberry Pi computers, called Astro Pis, equipped with environmental sensors (a Sense HAT) were sent to the ISS and then used to run students’ and young people’s programs, with ISS crew support.

HBB & OTR (BANES) partner to support loneliness in young people!

by

Funding delivered by Co-op Foundation through Building Connections Fund Youth strand

High Tech Bristol & Bath, and Off The Record (BANES) will help to make Midsomer Norton Town Hall more accessible for young people over the next three months after being awarded £9,981 from the Building Connections Fund Youth strand.

The partners will work with young people to come up with detailed improvements that may include designing novel games to help build connections and tackle loneliness.

Work is expected to be completed by March with a new DigiLocal club supporting the Town Hall and young people in the area.

Any young people who want to be involved, should contact John on john.bradford@digilocal.org.uk

Funding is being delivered by the Co-op Foundation as part of the Building Connections Fund Youth strand, a partnership with government.

High Tech Bristol & Bath, and Off The Record (BANES) are one of 145 projects that has received funded today.

Dr John Bradford (CEO, HBB), said:

“DigiLocal was designed to support communities to run tech clubs for their young people. This partnership with Off The Record continues that co-design approach, empowering young people to tackle loneliness through games design and collaborating in a friendly and fun club setting. The funding from Building Connections Fund will allow us to launch a new club with Midsomer Norton Town Hall and support young people in North Somerset.”

Jim Cooke, Head of the Co-op Foundation, said:

“Spaces where young people can come together to enjoy shared interests are important for building connections and tackling youth loneliness. By involving young people in improving local spaces, we’re helping to increase their confidence and skills, while also building stronger, co-operative communities. We look forward to seeing the impact this funding has tackling youth loneliness across England.”

The Building Connections Fund is a partnership between government, Co-op Foundation the Big Lottery Fund to tackle loneliness and improve community connections. Co-op Foundation is delivering grants for all projects supported through the youth-specific strand.

This builds on funding awarded to more than 120 projects in December that included befriending services, community arts groups and support schemes.

For more information on DigiLocal visit https://digilocal.org.uk/

For more information on Off The Record (BANES) visit http://offtherecord-banes.co.uk/

For more information on the Co-op Foundation, visit www.coopfoundation.org.uk

DigiLocal @ the BAFTA’s

by

Saturday 7 July saw myself and Anish Raja (DigiLocal@Bradley Stoke) heading up to London for the prestigious BAFTA Young Games Designer awards 2018!

BAFTA don’t release how many young designers enter the competition, but it’s run nationally across the UK. I know at least half a dozen other young people from the West of England region entered so Anish did exceptionally well to be selected as a Finalist.

In total there were 40 games on display across four categories:

  • Game Concept (10-14yr)
  • Game Concept (15-18yrs)
  • Game Making (10-14yrs)
  • Game Making (15-18yrs)

Anish was in the Game Concept (10-14yrs) and up against some very stiff competition.

In the end, the award went to Dalvia & Tiya Dhillon with their game concept for addressing mental health issues: Trapped

The BAFTA YGD stage

I was there as a Nominated Mentor of the Year. An amazing and very unexpected nomination, especially as you aren’t told who’s nominated you until they play the supporting video clips from your nominators.

I was completely floored when Primrose & Alex from DigiLocal@Barton Hill came up on the big screen!

Ultimately the mentor award went to Adam Syrop for his work with youth offenders.

However, as my nomination was the only one that draw a collective ‘Aww’ from the audience over Primrose’s statement, I think I was the real winner!

All told a fantastic day out, and I’ll be encouraging all young people within the DigiLocal communities to enter their ideas next year. We’ve developed some additional materials to help structure ideas and present them to the BAFTA judges.

We’ve also got more challenging projects to help develop those critical story-telling, and software engineering skills for a great game production.

Mission Mars!

by


One of the great challenges in supporting communities to run tech clubs for their young people is keeping a steady flow of really high quality projects for those young people to undertake. They need to be challenging and fun, educational and fun, embody good engineering principles and fun; did I mention they need to be fun?

At the start of the last academic year (Sept 2017) I put a proposal to the University of Bristol for their Physics Industrial Project module. I’d been in discussion with the School of Physics for about 6 months before this, understanding their needs and how to present a challenge that their students would appreciate, and that would give me some original new projects to share with our DigiLocal clubs.

The project brief I put in was selected by a crack team of four (Lily, Fiona, Lorna, and Ben) who would liaise with me as the ‘client’. My deliverable was (deceptively) simple, a new project guide that would enable DigiLocal® young people to build a Mission Mars game with at least 4 levels of difficulty. Their task was to incorporate ‘proper’ physics and produce a guide that had been tested with real young people from our network of DigiLocal clubs. This was not a lab exercise!

Fortunately the team took to it with huge gusto and immediately came up with a plan to incorporate the whole Key Stage 3 & 4 Physics Curriculum in a single game! At our first project catch-up meeting we discussed realistic deliverables and the time involved in producing high quality documentation as well as good physics code. This didn’t dampen their enthusiasm and they set off with renewed focus and unabated vigour.

Over the next few months they produced a range of games, from simple animation examples through to advanced computational models (Hohmann transfer orbits anyone?). All their ideas were rigorously tested with young people, the team worked directly with 4 clubs over the period and I hosted their draft guides with the main DigiLocal resources so all 16 clubs had access and quite a few tried them out unsupported.

One of the key objectives for the academic award was to use good educational theories in developing the project guides. The team researched and adopted the model of conceptual gain to evaluate the learning experienced over individual and multiple sessions (some of the guides went through more than 6 iterations). As well as an online questionnaire, they observed activity during the sessions (including the wonderfully titled ‘fiddle factor’ representing the confidence of the young people to experiment with the code to see what would happen), and had a number of conversations with young people about what was going on (semi-structured interviews). They were particularly interested in used model-driven code to challenge common misconceptions around physics, especially forces & motion.

Example of findings from the final report.

Summerhill was separated out because it was a Primary School and the abstract concepts were thought to be more advanced than would be expected for that age group (typically 8-10yrs). Sample sizes weren’t sufficient to claim significance, however, there were substantial gains across the board. This is fantastic as DigiLocal isn’t a curriculum driven service, which means we can afford to be more challenging than might be found in general teaching. In fact my un-official briefing to the team was not to be afraid to ‘blow their minds’ a little!

I was also relatively unconcerned that the guides produced were much longer than ‘normal’ project guides from CodeClub and others. Generally a club session is 1 hour and you can’t always guarantee that young people have Scratch accounts or usb-memory sticks to save their work between sessions. So most guides have to be achievable in 1-hour.

All our DigiLocal laptops are on a secure Dropbox account so the young people have their own save folders, which means they can happily carry work across multiple sessions. This give much greater flexibility to tackle large, more complex projects and concepts.

Ultimately the team produced 4 ‘major’ project guides (Take Off!, Getting to Mars, Moving around in Space & on Earth, and Touchdown Mars), along with 3 smaller projects and a pack of additional resources!

Some of our testers for Mission Mars! (taken a few weeks earlier when they’d just received their Yellow LINKS awards).

So what did the young people think?

Well between 60% & 80% of responses on the anonymous questionnaire felt they could do the projects ‘with a bit of help’, suggesting the challenge was there but not insurmountable.

And what about the fun?

Between 72% & 80% said the sessions were excellent (rising to 100% if you include good, it was a 4 point Likert scale). So yes, I think the team nailed it!

This was a fantastic experience for DigiLocal and the University of Bristol students. I’m currently drafting the brief for next year’s Industrial Project teams!