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Lower and upper sixth students form Leighton Park teamed up with UCL, Kendrick School and John Madejski Academy to take part in a two-day Green meets Grey “hackfest-a-thon” organised by ConnectTVT at Green Park in Reading. The aim of the two-day challenge was to solve real problems for a range of organisations both big and small such as water irrigation and mapping systems to name a few. Through a range of presentations and ice-breaking activities the mixed-school teams were able to understand the importance of business case building, rapid prototyping and creativity when developing an innovative solution.
Each team worked with a representative from a local organisation which a given real world problem to solve using IoT (Internet of Things) technologies. Each group brainstormed and refined their ideas before splitting into technical and business teams. It was at this point that the groups needed to utilise their communication skills to ensure that both sub-teams were working along the same critical path and kept to given timescales. The business teams developed marketing and financial plans around a client profile. The technical teams used Python controlled sensor boards to measure elements such as temperature, rotation and moisture, using computational thinking skills such as debugging and decomposition to edit existing libraries to transmit output from the sensor readings. On the second day, the teams made further developments to their prototypes and undertook strategic testing approaches to demonstrate their solutions with a pitch communicating the full business solution to the other teams and represented organisations.
The winning team which included Tao from Leighton Park developed a solution to help Thames Water solve the problem of providing water supply to households. The solution included using smart sensors with cameras into water pipes to collect the necessary data. This data would then be turned into information and shown on a smartphone app so that a customer could get the problem identified before the water storage occurred.
“I really enjoyed that Green Park Challenge not only because of winning it as result, but also for improving my presentation ability. It was actually the first time that I made a presentation in English which is not my first language. What's more, it is challenging but interesting to work with students from other different schools.” Tao Chen (Winning team H2O with initiative FISH)
"Overall event was very fun and useful, we practiced very important life skills. It was well organised. " Student, Leighton Park
"The Green Park day was a good experience ... good to work with organisations over a number of days" Student, Leighton Park
"Very focused on coding and marking and good for improving business skills" Student, Leighton Park
"Under the slogan of ‘Dream big, start small, act now’ (Robin Sharma) the 60 enthusiastic Sixth Formers and a plethora of engaging industry experts were ‘full STEAM ahead’ as they generated an audible buzz at the CISCO Offices on Green Park during the 9th and 10th November. An impressive initiative, the brain child of Mark Mason (Director of Design Thinking) and Louize Clarke (Connect TVT), focussed the creative minds of our students on team building challenges which combined the elements of technology and business to solve real industry related problems. It was heartening to hear the key skills required in today’s workplace echo many of our Quaker values: particularly the notion of an equal voice. Additionally, our students were encouraged to adopt the principles of ‘agile development’ and to raise the bar to achieve, and pitch for success!" Karen Gracie-Langrick (Deputy Headteacher)
https://www.leightonpark.com/news/2017-11-16/Green-Meets-Grey
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