Digital Media Taster Day at Colchester Institute

Colchester Institute (CI) narrowly avoided the arctic weather last week, delivering a fantastic day of Digital and Creative Media workshops and presentations for Honywood and Philip Morant students on Monday 26th of February.

This was the latest of their key sector taster days, delivered in partnership with the ESB’s Education and Industry STEM Programme team.

The day began with a short presentation, highlighting Colchester’s standing as a digital and creative hub in Essex, and then students were split into groups and sent off for their first interactive workshops.

Colchester Institute staff laid on workshops around Cyber Security, Sound and Visual Effects and Game Design throughout the day, giving pupils the chance to ‘have a go’ and ask questions of academic staff about courses available to study at the college in years to come.

In the Visual Effects workshop students had fun creating images using CI’s green screen technology, and laughter could be heard throughout the day as those images became more and more unusual! The Sound Effects workshop saw students learning how sounds are made for film and tv, and guessing what implements might be used to recreate specific noises. Students played ‘Cyber Security Cluedo’ in another workshop, and learnt how to create a computer game, using the Python programming language, in the last session of the day. Each workshop gave Colchester Institute the opportunity to highlight related courses (such as their new level 4 Cyber Security qualification) to our attendees.

Feedback on the day was fantastic, with both students and teaching staff saying how much they’d enjoyed the event and found the workshops extremely valuable and interesting. We asked students to complete the sentence ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned today it’s that…’ and responses included the following: ‘What qualifications you need to achieve these [careers]’, ‘there are more careers available than I thought’, ‘the importance of cyber security’ and ‘better understanding of the courses available here’.

Our thanks, as ever, go to Colchester Institute for laying on such an enjoyable day, to Philip Morant and Honywood Schools for taking students along to the event and of course to the students themselves for getting stuck in!