Wired Next Generation Trip

On Saturday 4 November 2017, 35 Computing students from Third, Fourth, Fifth and Upper Sixth Form attended the Wired Next Generation Conference at the Tobacco Docks in London. The one day conference, run by Wired magazine is specifically aimed at 12 to 18 year-old students and piggybacks onto their main UK conference for businesses. Attending the conference enables students to visit a variety of workshops, hear inspirational keynote speakers from around the world and have hands-on experience trying out new technologies that haven’t even been released to the market.

This year students heard from a variety of speakers including:

• Beth Healey who is a medical doctor and polar scientist that participated in the European Space Agency’s mission ‘White Mars’ which involved spending a year living in Antarctica to research the effects spending a long time in space can have on the human body;
• Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a space scientist who currently presents the Sky at Night;
• Ross Atkin, a designer and engineer who has been collaborating with other engineers as part of the iFix programme on the BBC;
• Silas Adekunle, a roboticist and entrepreneur who started up Reach Robotics who are about to launch a new gaming robot and platform MekaMon that combines robots with games via augmented-reality game play.

The workshops the students attended ranged from ‘How to make a more sustainable city’ to ‘Building your own drone.’

Some of the highlights of the event included a demonstration of the Gravity Flight suit by Richard Browning who has just set a new world record. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-41915072/iron-man-flight-sets-first-world-record and Tom London who combines magic and mathematics.

Several of the students were interviewed by Wired magazine and their interviews feature in the Wired YouTube video below.