BU Research Blog

Staff and students from the Bourne Academy recently came to Bournemouth University for a school trip. The trip was organised to thank the school for being involved with research projects in partnership with BU. The staff included James Foreman and Dan Orme, who both teach Computer Science plus Nicola Al-Jassar.

With support from Dr Christos Gatzidis, Principal Academic in Games Technology and Games Programming, the trip was organised to support the Academy students’ Computer Science classes giving them the opportunity to learn more about programming and projects at BU. The day was run by BU Ph.D. student Karsten Pedersen (Games Technology and Games Programming; Department of Creative Technology) and facilitated by BU Ph.D. student Sarah Hodge (Morality and Video Games, supervised by Dr Jacqui Taylor and Dr John McAlaney; Department of Psychology).

(Nicola Al-Jassar,  Dan Orme, James Foreman, Sarah Hodge and Karsten Pedersen)

The students got to experience the facilities at BU by engaging in many programming activities; including how to program in Javascript from the basics to, later on, extending to a simple framework to make a Space Invaders-type game.  The students were shown previous final year project work from students at BU. They also played some of the games made by students at BU. The Academy students were encouraged to build upon the code that they learnt during the day in order to support the programming that they current do at their school and also coding club.

Both staff and students thoroughly enjoyed the very inspirational day and hope to taking their programming skills to the next level!