How many people have spent the last two weekends educating 13 to 19yr olds? We can solidly promise you that it involves throwing a lot of tennis balls, big pens, huge post-its and it’s collated together with a workshop rule, “no throwing the laptops”. Yup, that’s right. We’ve been on the BBC Blast tour.

BBC Blast, which tours the UK in a HUGE bus, has a fantastic mission; give young people an opportunity to experience and learn a few skills and in a fantastic environment.

We pitched a workshop, inspired by the Thought Den Industry Day, called Flash Games – Social Network Wigetry! An intro session aimed at getting creative minds thinking, explaining and ultimately using Flash to produce their own piece of work. Their own version of…

So the last few weekends we’ve been playing ice-breakers, brainstorming, inspiring creative photography, taking abuse and finally herding twitchy mouse fingers through the Flash interface.

It was an immense amount of fun, but ultimately, a lot of kids left feeling like they could confidently use flash to handle some of the more basic interface tools. Hurrah! The plan worked.

Big thanks to the amazing Holly Edwards from RIO who was running the shin-dig, Cathy the content lady, who taught me how to juggle in her lunch-break and to all the kids who weren’t a pain in the….

Some of you might already have heard about our dalliances with the world of education, but here in all it’s glory is the launch video for our Industry Day product. It was all filmed on location at Bournemouth University Media School with the 2nd year students on Interactive Media Production. We had a fantastic time with everyone down there and can’t wait to roll it out around Britain in the next academic year. Find out more about the Industry Day, and check out Dan’s sexy centre-parting in the video below…

The project was first commissioned through the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, based at Bournemouth Media School. There is more information here about the day on the CEMP site. A big thankyou to Holly Budge of Hip Joint Films for her hard work on the video. There’ll be a 3 minute taster on the way too, as this one might be a little long for the casual user…