Some of our IT students had the opportunity to get involved in BIMA’s Digital Day on Tuesday 13 November. The session was delivered by Duncan Nisbet of Testagility which offer bespoke software testing training to companies and organisations.

The day started off with students getting the chance to find out about and use augmented and virtual reality.

Jess said “I learnt lots about different apps and how to use augmented reality – watching the dinosaur come to life was good fun.”

The day was designed to give students an idea of what it is like to work in the digital world and so they were given challenges that they had to solve with a digital product.

Team 1 were given the challenge of attracting more people back into the high street. Their response was to design an app called Virtual Scanner that allowed shoppers to pay for their products in the shops using their phones to scan the barcodes. This meant there were no long queues to stand in – who likes queuing! Even better, the goods would be delivered too! Another part of the app allowed people who are unable to get to the shops to use Virtual Reality (VR) to walk around to choose and pay for the goods.

Team 2 were tasked with developing a marketing campaign for a new BBC online series called Earthlings which compares the daily lives of people across 7 continents over 14 episodes. The team created an app with an interactive globe with markers to take the user to each of the episodes. 

Paul said “ I really enjoyed the day especially the teamwork and sharing our ideas. It was a good experience.”

Team 3’s challenge was to increase the number of people engaged with the England Women’s Football Team (The Lionesses) who are competing in next year’s FIFA World Cup in France in July 2019 and also increase the number of girls aged 8-16 to give playing football a try with their local club. They came up with an app that allowed people to engage with the team on social media as well as a game with the aim of trying to score goals against the members of the England Football Team.

Duncan commented  “I had an inspiring and rewarding day working with the fabulous students who clearly put their all into the day.

What has really stuck with me is that each of the students wanted the other students to succeed – it was lovely to see how they interacted with each other in order to pull the best out them. Some adults could learn a thing or two from this behaviour!”

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