A team of students at North Primary School from Colchester will be taking on the best young roboticists from around the world when they compete at the VEX Worlds in Kentucky, USA at the end of April. Their story starts back in the summer of 2016...

Augmented Reality is a new and upcoming technology which could have a big impact in education across the board in the coming years, and in the modern world children are using and becoming accustomed to technology at a much younger age. Technology is also influencing our lives at a much greater scale than ever before which is why it is important that the education sector keeps pace with this and prepares children for the world they will be inheriting in the future. The classroom must always try to reflect the world children are experiencing outside.

We all agree that education is the primary necessity of our society. Educated people invent new technologies to achieve more comfort in their daily routines, however, both are dependent on each other. I believe that literate people innovate more and more while technology helps to produce well-educated citizens.

Whilst we know that the skills associated with computational thinking are vital for today’s children to flourish in the 21st Century workplace, the practicalities of teaching coding during school hours can sometimes be perceived as a challenge. There is often a misconception that incorporating workshops and lessons that will instill the important skills associated with computational thinking will take a lot of work. But, with simple techniques, we know how easy this can actually be! Here are my top tips for breaking down barriers to coding and setting your pupils up with life-long skills.

Last year huge investment was made in the education industry, with almost two-thirds (64%) of education employees reporting investment in digital technologies. This, according to government statistics, equates to more than £900m.

A chatbot is an "artificial intelligence (AI) program that simulates interactive human conversation by using key pre-calculated user phrases and auditory or text-based signals" (technopedia.com). Businesses throughout the United Kingdom and elsewhere are rapidly adopting chatbots to support their business. Vodafone, the well known phone company, has a chatbot to help people learn about which phone plans best fit their needs, for example. But what about using chatbots in educational settings?

When expectations are growing but budgets are falling, you have to be confident that how you spend that budget has a strong impact in the classroom, and is therefore really great value for money.

I still find it hard to believe that the internet as we know it today was only created around 30 years ago in the 1990’s. It was only much later than this date did it start to become mainstream, with my own first experience of it in 1996 - and that was only at school. This is because it was still really expensive for your average person to have at home, our household certainly couldn’t afford it until some years later. The internet’s true potential was yet to be fully realised, however, and in such a short space of time, it has created (and destroyed) billion pound businesses in that small time frame.

Arguable the busiest day so far, the Innovate My School and Edtech Impact teams greeted day 3 with energy and excitement. As the coffee and conversation flows, we soak up as much as possible as the final day of Bett approaches.

Conversations are powerful, and they fuelled day 2 at Bett. Edtech Impact were joined by the Innovate My School team who, after grasping the sheer scale of Bett, loved every second they had catching up with suppliers and securing more innovative companies for our pioneering Speed Date sessions. The Bett Futures area was absolutely buzzing with people discussing Edtech Impact, which went live on Wednesday. Here are our highlights from Day 2.