A two week workshop run by Prof. Fred Deakin, Chair of Interactive Digital Arts at University of Arts London. The workshop took students from a mixture of creative backgrounds and three different universities Falmouth, UAL and Manchester. The aims of the workshop were to get students to collaborate with other creative’s over the country and complete a self-directed project at the end. The workshop was run in London however to communicate with Falmouth and Manchester, Fred had a team that worked with us utilising online video camera technology called Fuze and to keep in contact via message and upload documents, we used a programme called Slack. We used Fuze to view Fred and two other Pod members in London giving various talks on different strategies to how we can come up with ideas and critique them. We then split off into various groups in separate chat rooms on Fuze to try out the techniques and come up with ideas. We also had the privilege to view Lectures in London and be critqued on work by members within the industry; professional designers such as Joel Lewis from Hellicar and Lewis, Liam Fay-Fright an ex-Mother Communications Director, Nat Hunter, Paul Wyatt etc.

 

I worked in a pair with Charlie Killick and we wanted to bring digital play physical. Our brief was to motivate young people to encourage and gain interest in coding by interacting with it physically. People are put off by learning a new language and children find it daunting seeing another language on screen not knowing where to start. We decided our audience would be 4 to 5 year old’s but had to take into consideration that children are still learning their own English language then so it is even more important that our product is physical and taught perhaps through puzzle recognition.