Bright Sparks

After spending 11 hours at work on Thursday setting up everything for Bright Sparks and Blue Fusion, the first day of the event (Bright Sparks) for the year eight age group occured on Friday. The day had a bit of a bumpy start with everything just pulling together in time, but once the ball started rolling the rest of the day flowed like clockwork.

Blue Fusion (previously known as Young Visions) attempts to inspire children about Science, Technology and Engineering and is run during National Science and Engineering week. The event is run be recent graduates to IBM Hursley, with 5 of the previous years graduates making the lead team and twenty most recent graduates making the rest of the organising team. The event is run during the week by around 200 volunteers from all over IBM UK, and we have 80 schools, each bringing six children over the week.

Each year develops new activites to be used during the event, and many of the activities are reused for other events in IBM like Bring Your Child to Work Day, and University Challange (previously known as Thinkpad Challenge). We have six new activites this year, and I will hopefully get the chance to describe some of them in depth later.

I will put up some photos later, but for now just wanted to warn you that most posts over the next week will be Blue Fusion related.