Brighton barcamp 3

This weekend saw Brighton’s third barcamp, held at the Students’ Union building at the University of Sussex. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, barcamp is an ‘ad-hoc unconference’: a whole weekend of talks provided by the participants themselves. Every one who attends has to talk, and the schedule is created simply by people writing down their details on a piece of card, and then pinning it up in an available time slot.

Photo credit: Jessica Spengler

And that is why they are great: the ‘you must talk’ barrier to entry means that barcamps are generally where you find the most committed and passionate geeks. You also get a great range of talk topics: from grindingly technical, highly-focussed explanations of specific pieces of software, to far-reaching group discussions on very broad topics. It’s this very quirkiness and unpredictability that makes a barcamp so entertaining.

Anyway, back to what happened: each day was taken up by presentations, interrupted only by breaks to eat and drink (Cogapp sponsored the lunch on the Saturday).

Then the evening and night-time gave way to mass social activities such as drinking, playing Werewolf and ‘War on Terror- the board game‘ (here’s another reason I like barcamp: it has the distinct feel of ‘lunatics taking over the asylum’)

I gave a talk on Scratch, the drag-and-drop programming language for children. It was something we played with a while ago here at Cogapp, which I then went on to use with my 6 year-old son (he shouts out how he wants each game to work, and plays it, while I frantically try to implement all of his feature requests). I gave a live demo, creating a game of pong in under 10 minutes, followed by showing how you could make your own giant joystick and link it up to Scratch using the Picoboard sensor board.

Photo credit: Jez Nicholson

In the spirit of ‘eating my own dogfood’ I created my presentation using Scratch itself rather than Powerpoint or Keynote, and you can see it on the Scratch site.

I didn’t manage to spend as much time there as I would have liked, but some of the interesting talks I saw included:

• How social sites deal with death by Paul Silver
• Lillypad Arduino by Marrije Schaake (view presentation on Slideshare)
• Stackoverflow by Jon Linklater-Johnson
• The A to Z of Game Design by Cennydd Bowles
• R3 by Steve Marshall

Honorable mention must also go to all the switched-on people I chatted to over the course of the weekend. Including but not limited to: Ant Miller (the BBC micro, power-sensing microcontrollers), Ian Forrester (BBC Backstage projects), Nigel Crawley (Arduinos and electroluminescent wire), Jez Nicholson (agile programming and zombies).

Further info:

• Barcamp Blog
• Backnetwork
• Photos on Flickr