The Mozilla Festival, which we have hosted at Ravensbourne for the last three years, is a great place to have serendipitous meetings. This year I was lucky enough to encounter the incredible Maggie Philbin, most well known for her work presenting the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop TV programmes. Currently, however, she is doing sterling work promoting technology subjects and careers amongst schoolchildren via the TeenTech events and awards. The students on the BA (Hons) Web Media course had just completed magazine sites for the Mozilla Festival as their first project, so as a second project I suggested they do something similar for the TeenTech City event taking place at the Copper Box in the Olympic Park.

In less than a month, we had pulled the student involvement together. The Web Media team produced three sites covering the many activities at TeenTech City – Tech Tomorrow, Generation Tech and WebTech. The students spent all day at the event on 27th November, talking to the young attendees and the companies managing the various challenge stands and projects. Nearly 500 children were present, and the Web Media students collected a huge amount of content, which can be found on their sites. It was a brilliant event, which I wish existed when I was a kid. It showed that science and technology can be enormous fun, and will be great for promoting these fundamental career areas. TeenTech’s own report of the City event can be found here.

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