Skip to main content

Come to Breakfast with Paul Foster of Microsoft - Engaging children in technology

Image
By

What: Engaging children in technology

When: Wednesday 15th June 2016 @ 7.30am

Where: Maids Head Hotel, Tombland, Norwich, NR3 1LB

How much: £11

RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/229668663/

Engaging children in technology – the micro:bit satellite inventors kit

The original BBC Micro enabled and inspired many of us to start programming and pursue a technical further education and career. With the BBC microbit, the BBC are trying to inspire the current generation of young people to get creative with technology. The microbit is a ‘thing’ in the Internet of Things era. This breakfast meeting will introduce you to the microbit, enable you to get hands on programming (if you want to bring your laptop), and present the ambitious plans behind the Satellite Inventors Kit for microbit which brings science and technology together with an exciting Space context.

Although schools can obtain microbits for free, and there has been tremendous effort producing lesson plans for teachers, the fundamental state of our education system requires the support of the skilled technical community. We need to step up and support our teachers, schools and pupils by helping to deliver technical materials. It would be a fantastic outcome of this meeting if we could start a movement in Norfolk to do this, your input on how is most welcome!

Paul Foster

Since joining Microsoft in 1994, Paul Foster has worked across a wide range of sectors and with a wide range of customers, providing a mix of technical and strategic guidance around the creative use of technology in relation to their business needs.

As an established public speaker across Europe and having spent a considerable amount of time working on the cutting edge of technology providing leadership and inspiration on topics like Smart Devices, Cloud Computing, Education and App Development, Paul is currently working as a Principal Technical Evangelist for Microsoft UK’s Developer Experience Group, focusing on the building of next generation sensor webs which automate the gathering of data from disparate sources, and how to enable the creative analysis of this data to start a new era of perception.

For a short time Paul was a member of a high-wire flying trapeze circus troupe, and is a keen roboticist.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more