Web Applications UK Latest Updates

Web Applications UK sponsors Oldham Works campaign

Craig Dean — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:57:00 GMT

We’re passionate about our local community, and so it is with great pride that we joined with the Oldham Chronicle to sponsor the ‘Oldham Works’ campaign; an opportunity to send out a positive message about businesses in the local area.

Included in the supplement are 3 pages of editorial and content about Web Applications UK, including news regarding our education programmes and the new move. The campaign has been a great success with a copy of the supplement being handed to Gordon Brown yesterday.

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Education, Education, and Education

Craig Dean — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:24:57 GMT

I was still required to wear shorts and a ‘bumble bee’ cap for school when I received my BBC Micro Model B; and, like many of my generation, it defined my future almost instantly. It was the first time I subscribed to magazines like ‘Micro User’, ‘Acorn User’, ‘Your computer’ and ‘BeeBug’ which I lapped up and would wait for the postman to deliver. It was an age when programmes came as listings which would have to be painfully and carefully typed out, sometimes taking hours. I didn’t have a disk drive at the time, so I’d get to play the games until they crashed or I had to switch of the micro. I still remember the excitement on getting a tape drive and successfully saving my first carefully typed out listing; it was soon followed by original games I’d painstakingly developed myself.

I’m not one for nostalgia, but an entire generation of developers in the UK grew up typing in their own listings and debugging code by reading it off a page. That just doesn’t happen today, and though I’m all one for progress, what is there that gets young people excited about writing code? That’s why it’s as important today as ever, for IT companies to engage with the youth to get them to see computers as more than just games machines or productivity tools – but as a blank canvas on which to exercise their creativity.

It’s one area Microsoft are again leading the way in with their XNA Creators Club. XNA allows amateurs to write games for their XBox 360, and it’s not particularly hard. But it’s an area that even relatively small companies can get involved in. Which is why we work so hard with the local schools, last Tuesday we went to North Chadderton High School to turn some of their students into ‘coders for day’, by showing them how easy it was to download and install Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition and write their first ever programme – in this case a simple calculator in C#.

Today I got a lovely email from Carrie Marshall, the Enterprise Manager at the school, “First of all I want to say a massive thanks for the work you did with our Year 10 Diploma students the feedback was extremely positive from the students, one student went to the deputy head to express how much they had gained from the session. So thank you for doing it and at such short notice.”

On 20 July, Microsoft themselves will be attending the school to demonstrate XNA directly, and later in the year I will be presenting a guest lecture at Oldham College for the students on the IT Careers Academy. I also sit on the advisory board for the academy, allowing us to influence the future direction of the courses, and encourage students to participate.

We also provide mentors for the academy students, and are working with a number of other schools. Tomorrow, for instance, a team is at Bluecoats school providing mock interviews, giving the students experience of what it’s like to attend an interview for a job. Later in July I’ll be visiting Hulme Grammar to talk about opportunities to participate there as well.

Working with schools is not a publicity stunt for us. We’re not just passionate about young people and about IT, we’re committed to helping our local community, and we can’t encourage other businesses enough. There are plenty of opportunities, and if you’re finding it difficult to get involved with local education in the Oldham area, why not drop us a line, we’ll be happy to point you in the right direction!

In these difficult economic times, it’s easy for companies to become insular and self-focussed, but actually it’s really an ideal time to start reaching out and helping your neighbours, get involved in local programmes and initiatives that are making a genuine difference to the community in which you live and work.

You never know where you might end up. We’ve recently become lead sponsor on the Oldham Works campaign, promoting positive news about business in Oldham. Tomorrow the campaign is being presented to a certain Mr Brown in Downing Street, so it really does pay to get involved!

The Loch Ness Award	Kamal Choudhury
The Starbucks Award	Bob Hall
The Bruce Forsyth Award	Steve Elliott
The Mission Impossible Award	Craig Dean
The Scrooge Award	Peter Bettison
The Early Bird Award	Steve Morgan
Cool & the gang Award	Steve Elliott
The Nike Award	Jeffrey Ng
The Agoraphobia Award	Robin Lester
The Judith Chalmers Award	Shui Ip
The Pride of Web Apps Award	Lee Tudor

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