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George was really excited to be chosen to do the UK IT Challenge for disabled young people and talked about going on it quite a lot! The event was held over three days at BT’s Adastral Park in Ipswich. Adastral Park is huge and has around 4,000 BT employees working there.
Day 1 of the challenge, George had 2 individual challenges to do. The first involved searching for specific information on the Internet and the second was quite a tough Excel spreadsheet challenge. After that we went to our hotel, where George was thrilled to discover that the room had been booked in his name, so the TV in the room had a welcome message with his name on it, scrolling across the screen!
Day 2 started with a team challenge. George was in a team with three other people. Their task was to program a Crumblebot. This was like a robot challenge with the robot being programmed with a language called Crumble, which is very similar to Scratch. The team observer, from BT, said that the team worked well together and did really well with that challenge. Well done to George and his team mates Zac, Caitlin and Bethany!
After a short break, it was time for the third individual challenge. This involved editing some PowerPoint slides with graphs, pictures, texts, animation and removing the background from a picture.
After lunch it was time for the final challenge, which was another team challenge. On Day 1, each team was given a mobile phone to take photos of the event. This challenge was to use MovieMaker to make a 1 min 30 sec photo montage of how the event went for the team. Once again, the BT observer was impressed at how well the team worked together, and their photo montage looked really good.
On the morning of Day 3 we had a tour of BT’s Innovation Centre. This is something that they normally reserve for corporate visitors, so we were fortunate being able to see it. There were so many really cool innovations there - we wouldn’t mind having some of them at home! After lunch it was time for the awards to be presented. There were runner-up and winner awards for each of the individual challenges, winner awards for the team challenges, plus some other awards too. We were very proud when George was the winner of the third individual challenge - the PowerPoint challenge. His prize was a Google Home Mini, which he was really thrilled to receive.
The staff from the Shaw Trust have obviously gotten to know George pretty well as when he was asked if he was OK, they replied for him with, “Maybe, maybe not”!
George had a fantastic time and would love to do it all again!
