Andrew Nimick Point Concept twitter.com/andrewnim

What a weekend it has been. Seems there were great activities going on everywhere. Luckily I chose to be part of an indoor one. As a judge at the first ever Bay of Plenty Mashup (possibly a world first), I spent the weekend walking around and talking to teams of great young people who had entered the competition.

I thought I would take the time to offer some more detail on what I saw and experienced, but first I have to say (and there is no political correctness at play) everyone who attended won. They won because they all learned something, maybe about themselves or a new skill. They all had a chance to take part in a high pressure race and provide a ‘product' of value.

The teams involved all had varying degrees of ability, experience and access to training. It had been hoped that an online mashup tool could help to level this playing field. The tool from a large well known international company claimed to need little or no coding knowledge. Sadly, it proved to take too long to learn and added more confusion.

But this did not deter the teams, who just got on and worked out other ways of achieving their goals. We saw lots of smaller issues dealt with in a very similar can-do attitude.

A surprise award
It is hard for me to truly put into words the amount of energy, enthusiasm and sheer hard work these teams put in over the two days. It was phenomenal and was so impressive to someone who visited and observed it that they very generously offered an additional $500 dollars as a cash prize for team effort.

Whoever you are, a big thank you from everyone involved in the competition.

We judges decided to split this sum and have two awards for teamwork. We also asked the mentors to supply us with their choices of which teams should get the awards.

Mentors
I was worried that we were a bit short on mentors and would have welcomed some more. The great bunch of guys we had were kept busy all weekend. It seems the teams where not shy of coming forward to get help.

Education
On Sunday morning I walked around talking to some of the teams and asked them about their access to and training in ICT in school. What I found was that the older teams (including Team Wicked Time the winners) were self taught and did not consider what was taught in school as useful or relevant. The younger ones were able to say that they were getting more access to more useful training and resources. This is thanks to recent curriculum changes.

Girl Geeks
I was really hoping for girls to attend the competition and was thrilled that we had one all girl team and one mostly girl team. Both teams did really well. Hopefully we can now use them as role models to encourage more.

The Next One
Now it is time to look forward to the next one. All the judges are keen to do it again and I hope we will get even more supporters and participants.

So please let's hear from you if you will be interested in helping next year. Let's make this a great event for our kids to aspire to.

And once more, a great big thanks to all the people who made this happen and especially to the young people who took part and thrilled the judges so much.