17 new Schoolhouses join Digital Schoolhouse at this year's Summer Boot Up Camp
As the academic year draws to a close, Digital Schoolhouse welcomes 17 new Schoolhouses to the programme and celebrates the achievements of our existing Lead Teachers at our annual Summer Boot-Up Camp.
The SBUC is an annual event that allows us to bring together our teacher network for three days of inspiring workshops, exciting announcements and reflection on their successes over the past year. And this year in particular felt incredibly special.
The event was hosted by one of our academic members, the University of Westminster at their Harrow Campus, which proved to be an ideal location for the variety of activities that our teachers were taking part in this year. As always, our Director, Shahneila Saeed, launched the event by introducing our newest Schoolhouses to our innovative play-based learning pedagogy, followed by an inspiring keynote from Paul Curzon on Unplugged Computing. It wasn’t long before our teachers were up on their feet, engaging first hand with some of the activities and getting their creative juices flowing! And it didn’t stop there, as they were soon whisked away to a workshop led by our very own Curriculum Content Developer, Estelle Ashman to get their dancing skills put to the test through our Just Dance to the Algorithm workshop.
Wrapping up with an opportunity to bring their own innovative ideas to lesson planning, our new teachers grouped up to devise ways to use Mario Kart Live in the classroom before ending the day with a well-earned social at Crazy Golf!
Day two brought our new and existing teachers together, providing multiple opportunities to build and strengthen those all-important peer relationships throughout the day. Again, our teachers engaged in some of our popular workshops with Estelle, including Part-Baked Games: Knockout City Edition, along with a structured learning opportunity with Laura Donaghy from Scirra on how to use Construct 3. For the final session, we were excited to be joined by our industry partners from Nintendo to discuss esports, with teachers sharing their own experiences of how to run an esports tournament in school. And what would a session with Nintendo be without a bit of Switch time?!
Our final day was a chance for our existing teachers to reflect on the year and share some of their own innovations for creative lesson planning, with activities in Playful Computing and using BBC Micro:bits in the classroom, adapted to beginner and expert level confidence. We were also privileged to host international guests from the Nordeus Foundation in Serbia for the entire event, with Marija Beslać (Communications and Partnership) and Miloš Paunović (Program and Projects) giving an inspiring talk about their numerous projects that support young people in accessing the digital economy.
After lunch, industry partners, Stefan McGarry from Ubisoft and Max Ward from Outright Games joined us for a careers panel talk exploring why innovation is so important in education and industry, alongside our Regional Academic Leads and the Nordeus Foundation. Our guests then helped present the awards for our Lead Teacher award ceremony, recognising the incredible achievements of our teachers this academic year, including an inaugural Innovation Award, which saw teachers across our network submit evidence of their most creative delivery in their schools.
See our award winners below:
- Most Pupils Taught: Sarah Vaughan - City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College
- Most Activity Delivered: Sarah-Jane Lynch - De La Salle College
- Influencer of the year: Clare Doherty, Roisin Rice, Leonard Meehan and Rebecca Poole - St Mary’s College
- Innovation Award: Chris Lovell - Ashfold School
Our Innovation Award was judged by both our Regional Academic Leads and industry partners, Stefan McGarry (Ubisoft), Max Ward (Outright Games), Andy Tomlinson (Electronic Arts) and Roger Henderson (Scirra). Submissions for the award demonstrated the inspiring levels of creativity on display across our schools and we'd like to give honourable mentions to runners up: Shane McVeigh, Holy Trinity College, and Liam Garnett, Leeds Libraries.
A special recognition to our international Schoolhouse, Kucheza Gaming in Nigeria for their incredible impact this year, reaching over 4500 students in Lagos.
From September, both our new and existing Schoolhouses will be available for workshop bookings. You can find out more about all of our Schoolhouses on our website.
