💓 #kidsbit

The KIDSBIT is a week-long summer school with two festival days on the weekend for kids aged 4-14. The aim if for the kids to explore new technology and discover its creative potential. The organizers managed to create a wonderful atmosphere within the walls of a former monastery, where the kids would code robots, create animations, explore fab-labs and raspbery-pi's, and – which was my part – animate monsters and robots in two tagtool-workshops.

Focus

It am extremely happy and honoured having been part of the first instance of the festival; it felt very much like going to the my first reboot in 2007: Great vibes, interesting topics, and all the people I met were there becasue it was a matter of the heart.

My special thanks go out to the Istituto Tedesco Perugia, who made this trip possible; and to all the good people at KIDSBIT, Giulia, Elisa, Luca, et al!

All photos by Yvonne Roberts

Last week we spent 8 days on the roads of England, delivering The Adventures Of Walter Lemonface to kids and their parents in towns like Barnsley, Huddersfield, Doncaster or Southport, to name a few. Now we are all on a break.

For me the first week was an experience I never had before and it will take time to sink in and be computed. It is fantastic to play for the audience, and maybe that is one of the key learnings: it is always the audience, not an audience.
Every Audience, though seemingly similar from its mixture, is unique. You simply can't say beforehand how and in which way it will connect to what you do.
And that makes me think how in software devlopment we define our 'audience' as the 'users' and make ourselves belief that we can actually understand them before they use our products. But hey-ho, that's a subject for another post, another time.

For now I am getting ready for the last two shows this weekend in Derby and Manchester before I head back home to Hamburg to get ready for the next adventure: the Kidsbit in Perugia.