On Thursday 23rd November Mr Withers took fourteen Y10 Computer Science pupils to Ark Bolingbroke to participate in a competition alongside 5 other Ark schools. This year's theme was about the environmental crisis. After a delayed start (an Ark school from Birmingham joined later in the morning), all teams got to work, sporting brightly-coloured Ark Hack t-shirts and tapping away on their Chromebooks.
The morning session was focused on designing an app to help solve the environment crisis. Team Pioneer identified a problem at the school - a lot of waste plastic from bottles during break and lunch time. Over the morning they refined the idea to create unique barcodes and special bins where pupils could scan and deposit their plastic bottle to receive points they could later reimburse for in-school rewards including merits, trips, and more. Members of the team worked on logos, slides, the presentation pitch, flow diagrams, app screen mock-ups, and more!
The afternoon session was focused on giving all participants the opportunity to solve environment related problems using Python - including writing a command-line climate quiz and calculating daily carbon footprints.
The whole day was facilitated by a finance-tech company who had some of their engineers support teams and judge presentations.
Despite the long journey to get south of the river and back again, all pupils enjoyed themselves immensely and where great ambassadors for Ark Pioneer.