Back to School

April 22, 2010 at 3:32 pm, Category: Business, Uncategorized, by Jane

On 3^rd February 2010, Nublue welcomed a class of Year 5 and 6 children from Arkholme C of E Primary School into their office for an IT lesson…with an exciting twist. I count myself as one of many who will look back to their IT lessons in primary school and remember crowding round the clunky old classroom PC, watching the teacher make a funny little green line move across the screen (what was that programme called??!) with the hope that I too would be able to have a go at making it move myself… thrilling stuff. I was therefore very intrigued to hear that I would be spending my morning with the Arkholme school kids who were coming to see the inside workings of a full service web agency and, get this, even design their own website! Beats watching funny little green lines on a screen any day, but then again, what wouldn’t?!

NuBlue Director Mike Ashworth discusses web design with the children from Arkhome C of E Primary School

At 10am, the school children and teachers arrived at NuBlue. After an introduction to the company by company director Michael Ashworth, I had the pleasure of taking them on a whistle-stop tour of our lovely office. First stop was meeting the most popular colleagues in the company, aka: Sharky and George the resident pet fish. Always a hit with visitors to the office, Sharky and George put on a riveting display of aquatic acrobatics for the children, especially George who has a tendency to swim backwards and upside down. We later learned that they had completely won the children over and were their office favourites…says a lot for the rest of us!! Other highlights of the tour were an introduction to HTML by one of our developers who also greatly impressed them by showing how he uses two computer monitors when working. Similarly worth a mention was the informative question and answer session with the company director, which took place in the hosting department. I was very impressed by the intelligent questions that the children were asking, including questions about our servers and systems that even taught me a thing or two! Gold star please! Our developers and designers showed the children examples of their work and answered lots of questions about topics such as how long it takes to learn code (answer: a long time!) how long it takes to fully create a website (answer: well that depends on many factors…) and whether we all enjoy our jobs every single day (answer: well yes of course…!). It was a lot of fun and we all very much enjoyed and appreciated the children’s’ interest and enthusiasm.

For the second half of the morning, the children were challenged to put what they had learned into practice in a website design competition. They were given a design brief for a new eco-friendly car website. The site was to be exciting, informative, with interactive features, and a concise navigation that would be user friendly. The children got to work with great enthusiasm and came up with some really cracking ideas. Springing to mind was the ‘Bobby Fizzo’ team who not only designed a dynamic animated navigation tool, comprising of a car which would ‘drive’ across the page to the different tabs, but who also used the computer to present their ideas as a slideshow. Very computer whizzy indeed! However, there could only be one winner and the prize went to LIGMH Eagle for their impressive site design. This design was chosen for its creativity and makeability, as demonstrated by one of our developers who spent the following days turning their designs into a live website as the competition’s prize (see the below link for hosted site). The developer enjoyed the challenge of working with the children’s fresh design and everyone loved the finished site. All of the children deserve praise, they showed great sparks of creativity and intelligence in their design choices, and were a lovely bunch of kids to work with.

The morning came to a close with a much appreciated round of applause from the children and teachers, and the surprise presentation of a NuBlue sponsored football kit to the captain of the school team. We have recently started sponsoring the team and are looking forward to following their progress throughout the season. Overall, it was a brilliant morning, enjoyed by all here at NuBlue and, as the thank you letters we received suggest, by the children and staff of Arkholme School too. Perhaps a return visit could be arranged sometime, or if not a trip to the school for a good old school dinner. Spotted dick and custard………. Yes please!!