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Blue Fusion 2011

Anton Piatek — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:24:26 +0000

As it is National Science and Engineering week, IBM Hursley are running Blue Fusion 2011 - The official press release summed it up quite well, and also contains a list of this year’s activities:

HURSLEY, U.K. - 11 Mar 2011: More than 450 students from 80 schools across the South of England will be celebrating National Science and Engineering Week at IBM’s 16th annual Blue Fusion event. The students will need to use quick thinking, scientific knowledge and teamwork in a number of fun activities, designed to inspire and encourage young people to develop their interest in Science, Technology and Engineering.

“Communication” is the theme for National Science and Engineering Week 2011 and volunteers from IBM Hursley, Europe’s largest software development lab, have put together a wealth of fun, inspiring and engaging activities.

Each day, teams from 16 schools will participate in a variety of specially-designed activities promoting innovation, teamwork, problem solving and communication skills. Students solve puzzles and technological challenges that explore basic concepts in some of the most interesting areas of modern technology. The activities will include building network communications to cracking codes to designing an ecologically friendly house. The students will experience first hand how science benefits our everyday lives and how instrumented, interconnected and intelligent technology can help build a smarter planet.

Approximately 200 IBM employees volunteer their time and experience to Blue Fusion, many of whom are recent graduates who can share their passion and experience of working in the industry with the next generation. Local dignitaries will be attending the event throughout the week to see the impact and success of Blue Fusion in inspiring young people into Science, Technology and Engineering.

I look forward to hosting schools on Thursday – it has been fun being involved for the last five years, so should be great this year too! I wrote briefly about Blue Fusion and Bright Sparks in 2007 (I can’t remember if that was the year I organised and ran Blue Fusion with Dan)

There are one or two videos about Blue Fusion which really show what the event is about:

BlueFusion 2007 – Done!

Anton Piatek — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 13:12:46 +0000

Thursday was the last day of this years Blue Fusion event. Friday was clearing and packing up, and the whole week even has left me quite exhausted. I will try and write a few posts to cover the activities we ran, but most of my time will be spent catching up with my day job and preparing to hand over the running of Blue Fusion to the new leads team, which will be chosen over the next few months from the recent graduates to Hursley who organised this years event. There were a lot of things we needed to know about this year- but didn’t, and I hope to make sure that we write all that down for next year’s team so that they have it a bit easier.

All in all I really enjoyed managing the event, and would probably consider doing it again if I were asked. Next year I think I might get involved with the development of an activity, possibly a computer based one…

Bright Sparks

Anton Piatek — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:32:44 +0000

After spending 11 hours at work on Thursday setting up everything for Bright Sparks and Blue Fusion, the first day of the event (Bright Sparks) for the year eight age group occured on Friday. The day had a bit of a bumpy start with everything just pulling together in time, but once the ball started rolling the rest of the day flowed like clockwork.

Blue Fusion (previously known as Young Visions) attempts to inspire children about Science, Technology and Engineering and is run during National Science and Engineering week. The event is run be recent graduates to IBM Hursley, with 5 of the previous years graduates making the lead team and twenty most recent graduates making the rest of the organising team. The event is run during the week by around 200 volunteers from all over IBM UK, and we have 80 schools, each bringing six children over the week.

Each year develops new activites to be used during the event, and many of the activities are reused for other events in IBM like Bring Your Child to Work Day, and University Challange (previously known as Thinkpad Challenge). We have six new activites this year, and I will hopefully get the chance to describe some of them in depth later.

I will put up some photos later, but for now just wanted to warn you that most posts over the next week will be Blue Fusion related.

Back to work

Anton Piatek — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:43:48 +0000

So my week off was really nice. I watched films, read books, took a quick day trip to the new forest with a friend down from London.

I won’t mention too much about the films and books other than to say Dune is an incredible book, I will be buying the whole set of them soon, Star Wars IV is far more dated than I remember (i guess it has been ~15 years since I last saw it), Batman and Batman Returns are slightly dated, but the incredible directing of Tim Burton makes them incredible nonetheless.

I have barely had time to do any real work even though I have been back for two days. Blue Fusion is taking up a lot of my time at the moment. On Thursday week we will be setting up for the event to run, so that leaves little time to finish everything off. Expect lots of posts about Blue Fusion after then as I will try to describe the activities we are running.

I just wish I had more time in the day so I could catch up with all the blogs I neglected to read on my week off.

Life in level 3 service

Anton Piatek — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 20:21:42 +0000

So I have had a few days to start settling in to Message Broker Level 3 Service. So far I have only managed two PMR’s (Problem Maintenance Request – what the customer opens when they have a problem with our product). They have both been customer errors. This is not to say that the error is between the keyboard and the chair, but that they missed something important and hence are not getting the results they expected.

There is nothing like looking at a list of customer problems that couldn’t be solved by earlier support people to make you feel like you know nothing about the software. Most of the problems coming in look incredibly complex to solve, so I will probably struggle for a while trying to learn more about the product. I suppose that if anyone knew all the answers then there wouldn’t be a need for a whole team so I am expecting to be doing lots of new stuff over the next several months.
Once I have my computer set up properly I will probably be creating some code fixes too, which should be fun.

My other piece of work, which I unfortunately cannot talk about the details at this time is also keeping me busy. Presentations are being prepared to show off the product to various IBM teams, particulary Lab Services (these guys go out to the customer and do some complex custom work for the customer, and proof concept work etc) and Technical Sales, and more and more ideas are coming in on how to change/improve the code. I am not sure when I will find the time to work on this so I could be busy for a while.

Blue fusion continues to keep me busy, and with only 8 weeks to go now time is getting precious. The activities are all coming along smoothly, and most are sounding very interesting indeed. I will certainly have to test some of these games, as they should be pretty good fun!

Most other organisation for the event is on track too, so the only big thing to do now is give a presentation to senior management in the labs tomorrow morning. It will be slightly scary to stand up in front of all the high level managers, but it will also be really good to get their feedback on our plans for the event.