Today, (Saturday) Maureen Gurr and myself headed to London to the BBC Broadcasting House bringing together the young people from Saffron Walden County High School and King Harold School for the planning day for ‘Create at BETT 2006.
For the past five years Ultralab have been working in conjunction with Apple Computer and other partners to deliver the ‘Create at BETT’ feature at BETT, the educational technology show at Olympia in London (11 – 14 January 2006).
The BETT Show attracted 24,000 visitors last year, the ‘Create at BETT’ stand is one of the few stands which does not actually sell anything, it is purely there to demonstrate how creative young people can be with technology.

Considering that people under the age of 18 are not allowed into the show, it is great that ‘Create at BETT’ continues to be the only stand fully staffed by young people ‘being creative’, the idea is that visitors will leave the show with creative ideas to take back to their institutions to move creative use of technology forward.
BBC Blast! are involved in the project this year, our training day for the young people involved took place at the BBC’s 21CC (21st Century Classroom) facility at broadcasting house.
On the stand the young people will be demonstrating film, sound, podcasting and animation technologies, all surrounded by an EastEnders theme. BBC EastEnders will be the focus of new script ideas, model animations of classic scenes and the challenge to create a new theme tune sequence for the show.

Both involved schools, friends of Ultralab’s Digital Creativity projects will be sending sixteen children to the show between them. The young people will stay in London with Ultralab.
Maureen Gurr, Richard Millwood, Kris Popat and Matthew Eaves will be representing Ultralab for the duration of the event on the ‘Create at BETT stand’.
Some images from the event: