BIMA Blog

Earlier in the year we announced our BIMA Schools Digital Challenge 2009 initiative, designed for teams of 13-18 year old students to come up with a ‘Digital’ solution that provides a practical benefit for their community.
We left the brief broad to give the students plenty of scope for imagination, with the key objective to encourage them to combine creativity and technology with real social benefits.
We received a phenomenal response to the challenge and the quality of submissions that we received was astounding, with some fantastically innovative ideas, which made judging particularly difficult. That said I’m pleased to announce the seven schools that have been shortlisted to the final stages:

The Shortlist:

1. Baxter College:
Submission: ‘BaxterVision’. An independent online television/information station.

2. Hautlieu School:
Submission: Digital archive of downloadable podcasts covering the years of the German occupation of Jersey, presented as a stand-alone website linked to the Jersey Museum and as a video wall in the War tunnels museum.

3. Our Lady and Saint Bede RC School:
Submission: A short film around the theme of ’shell shock’. They were incredibly moved by the stories of officers who suffered as a result of their experiences in the trenches and wanted to explore this further.

4. Hillcrest School and Community College
Submission: Hillcrest Learning Pod (HL Pod) and also a Hillcrest Learning Workstation (HL Workstation). These would be devices that pupils will use on a daily basis to enhance pupils learning and academic success.

5. Homewood School and Sixth Form Centre
Submission: To construct a highly interactive and user-friendly VLE to extend learner participation beyond the ‘traditional’ temporal and spatial confines of the school day.

6. Uplands Community College
Submission: A video and podcast available to be downloaded on portable multimedia players in French, Spanish and English. The video cast will allow the wider community to gain more knowledge about the place in which they live, work, attend school or visit.

7. Hampstead School
Submission: To provide Somalian mothers with IT activities in Somali that would help them to better support their children’s’ learning in secondary school thereby ensuring that they can play a fuller part in their children’s’ education.

We’re really proud to be pioneering this type of initiative; it’s a fantastic way to encourage our future innovators to think about new ways to use digital technology with real benefits for themselves and their communities, in the meantime, we have the hard task of deciding our overall winner and we’re really looking forward to announcing the winners next month.