Web Competition 2005 Wrap Up

This page is for committee members to records their thoughts while they're still fresh in everyone's mind.
See also the project plan in the form of a Mind Map.

Contents

Web Competition 2005 Wrap Up

post prizegiving follow-up actions

what went well

points for next time

other things we could do next time (if there is a next time)

Digitalbrain

Timescale

Communication with schools

St Birinus

Judging

Prizes

Publicity and Press Coverage

Coasters

Roles on the committee

anything we did that was unneccessary

comments

I (AdrianWalmsley /24.06.2005 17:17/) have several ideas but will wait till Monday 27th to add them
Brian Collins started talking about the “next time” without being prompted in the common room after the event.
He appears to be up for hosting it again (are we?), but there are building works going on at Cranfield that would have to be factored into the planning.

Feel free to expand on the headings below or add new headings.

post prizegiving follow-up actions

1. thank yous to schools (AW: done 12/7 – with coasters)
2. thank yous to sponsors (various)
3. thank yous to “hosts” from BCS HQ etc (AW – done – followed up with coasters sent 28/7)
4. schedule debrief meeting with committee (done- 6 July)
5. schedule debrief meeting with Cranfield
   scheduled for 12 October
6. Select suitable gifts for key Cranfield staff
7. organise presentation of certificates to St Francis (SLL – done)
8. organise presentation of certificates to Harwell Primary
9. return RM PC (AW had it – passed to GS 6/7)
10. meeting with St Birinus Headmaster (AW and Mike Rodd – 7 October)
11. some of the school sites would have gone against child safety guidelines if they were published on the internet. We ought to warn them (done by letter 12/7 AW).
    We could involve Carol if any state schools did so (SLL)

what went well

some of these were fine tuning as a result of experience last time

1. PC mouse was great but there was a bottleneck at entry to the Lefroy which pushed the schedule back 10 minutes..
2. Getting BCS HQ people etc to do “hosting” of schools. What started out as a way to avoid the problem of BCS people only talking to each other turned into a major plus: the BCS staff felt more involved and the schools were pleased to be welcomed by someone who knew about their website. Big thanks to Geoff/Sheila for pushing us into thinking of this
3. External input to the judging panel: Cranfield's Martin Lee 
4. We could not think of a fair way to single out an individual child to receive the helicopter ride, but the fruit machine game was a great and very visual way to allocate a random prize.
5. The ability to allocate prizes (donated by the sponsors or purchased from the prize fund) on the basis that every child gets some recognition
6. The tie-in with Key Stages of the National Curriculum was a good idea but..

points for next time

(see also under individual headings below)

1. we left a few key actions to people outside the team where we couldn't control the timescale.
   For example, design of the logo/badge and trying to obtain free BCS books.
2. Have a committee member in charge of publicity
3. Be clearer about the link between the competition and the National Curriculum. Do we want to maintain the link? If we do, we should start to think it through with the ICT LEA team at an earlier stage: how to handle exceptions, impact on marking scheme, etc.
4. Give a tighter brief to guest speakers. All speakers should be to be brief; to 
   1. congratulate the kids on their great entries
   2. say how pleased they are to be able to support/sponsor the competition
   3. wish them all the best in the future
   4. and not tell long personal stories
5. when feeding kids, it's better to have a much higher proportion of white bread sandwiches to brown bread, and serve plain not spicy pizza.
6. The fruit machine game (if we use it again) needs to be better explained, especially as some children may not be familiar with the old mechanical fruit machines on which the game was based.
7. Check the acoustics with handheld as well as the lectern microphones

other things we could do next time (if there is a next time)

1. Get the schools to design the poster (and logo?)
2. Be more helpful to the schools. For example, I know my other half has to produce a risk assessment every time she takes a school trip. Will the schools have had to do one for the prizegiving? And if so, would it be worth asking Carol to help us produce a standard risk assessment for the Cranfield event which we could make available to schools if they wanted it?

Digitalbrain

Oxfordshire has signed a contract with Digitalbrain to provide a web portal to schools in the county.
Rollout has started in 2005.

• What impact will Digitalbrain have on the web competition?
• Will it free the children from worrying about technicalities and allow them to be more creative?
• Or will it act as a kind of straitjacket and limit the ways for them to show individual creativity in their websites?

I simply don't know, but we do need to understand its impact.

From the Digitalbrain website

Oxfordshire partners with digitalbrain to provide portals for its schools Digitalbrain is delighted to announce that it has been selected by Oxfordshire to provide content portals for each of early years, primary and secondary. The portals will be in the form of a database to which relevant educational material can be added in all kinds of catergories. Whether it be premium, produced by teachers with proprietary programs or produced within the digitalbrain system the system can be tagged and searched for. Digitalbrain is also providing an online presence for all schools in Oxfordshire with customisable websites and the ability to opt for delivering courses electronically.

Timescale

Pretty much OK, but some observations

1. We started work on the posters a little late. I hadn't wanted to bother Keith with it till after we had got the branch programme cards printed and posted to members. But then Keith was on holiday and we ended up with a poster that used more colours than it should have, due to my lack of skills, and so was more expensive for Cranfield to print.
2. We need more time between marking and prize giving. For example we cannot order all the prizes including the CDs from Focus until we know the nature and number of the winning children (SLL)
3. After the prizegiving the team is a little tired and needs a rest. As at 29/7/05 we not have heard back from Cranfield with a date for a wrap-up meeting with them. Next time, well before the prizegiving we should fix the date for the post competition wrap-up meeting.

Communication with schools

1. The form filling on the website seemed to work well. As far as we know, there were no repeats of lost or seriously delayed messages from the schools to us (as happened in 2003)
2. Communication with the schools:
   1. Personalisation (using Mail Merge).
      Based on our experience with the branch mailing list, this was something I was keen to do.
      The problem was that Outlook Mail merge doesn't support attachments.
      I tried various shareware programmes and haven't yet found a satisfactory solution.
   2. Sending multiple personalised messages can cause your ISP to think you are generating spam
   3. Email format: plain text looks old hat. I tried Outlook's HTML format, but one school reported the HTML messages as unreadable.
      I guess we need a tool which generates mixed (HTML and plain text) messages and works with all kinds of mail clients
   4. Some schools had trouble with their mail systems.
      We found out that messages to Thierry Brunier were being thrown away by the St Birinus spam filter because they contained the word “competition”.
   5. The use of the oxon.webcomp email address worked well in that incoming messages were fanned out to Sheila, Adrian & Brian so we could all track activity. You need to remember to set up your email client to send messages as from that id, and I found it useful to bcc Sheila on outgoing messages.
   6. Neither Cheryl nor Geoff received an email asking them to look after schools or sponsors, is this because neither of them formally said they were coming to the prize giving (SLL)
      (from my log, emails were sent to Geoff and Cheryl timestamped at 22:28 and 23:00 on 15 June – but apparently they never arrived AdrianWalmsley /06.07.2005 16:48/)

St Birinus

These guys are sooo good.
Last time they had implemented colour-coded sections of their site through clever use of javascript.
In 2004 they completely reinvented their site with all the features we see today.
I was very pleased that BCS HQ came up with the consultancy deal but we have to treat that as a one-off.

Presumably St B will continue to be head and shoulders above the others technically.

• It would be good to find a way to recognise their expertise publicly without the other schools thinking they are up against too tough a competitor.
• Could we promote St B above the competition and invite them to join the judging panel and even help us run the next competition???

Judging

• Excellent that we had Martin Lee from Cranfield to help
• Does anyone share my feeling that the marking scheme has a few too many subdivisions?
  When there are several subheadings with only one or two points allocated to them, it wasn't easy to discriminate between entries.
• Would it be easier if there were fewer headings under which to award points, with, say a minimum of 10 marks per heading?
• Not quite – it's much easier to mark in a consistent way with small sub sections. However, I was not happy with our marking scheme this time and I heard murmers during the marking sessions that others were finding difficulties. I felt our marking scheme was not very fair on the juniors who naturally have less technical ability (SLL)
• Could we do more of the marking off line to minimise travelling and to make the time the judges do spend together more productive?
• Carol suggested we should be clearer about the extent to which the “Local Theme” was mandatory or advisory, and mark accordingly.

Prizes

• the fact that every child receives some form of recognition is highly valued – see for example the comments from Mike Callahan in the adjacent box.
  This is a feature that we should definitely try to retain.
• Gill Rhodes suggested to Sheila that the main prizes should be able to be used, at least in some way, towards the creation of web sites.
  By that criterion, the iPod shuffles qualify because they can be used as USB storage devices; the PS2s probably don't.
  Gill pointed out that the cameras her team won last time are still in use.
• The Focus CDs were really excellent: of all the prize donors I feel they would be most missed if they dropped out.
  The mix of CDs was just about right. The only possible fine tuning would be to align a little better with the age and gender profile of the entries. We seem to get a pleasingly high proportion of girls in the senior age group so could have done with fewer “shoot-em-up” type games.
• Carol felt that some of the prizes (PS2s) were toys and we should have come up with something more useful. Whilst I do have some sympathy with that point of view I wouldn't want us to turn too 'worthy', it's meant to be fun (SLL)

Publicity and Press Coverage

Victoria Reinthal was very helpful in drafting the press release before the competition, and Keith McLaren in writing the Press Release of the prizegiving itself and sending it to the usual channels used for BCS press releases.
However we should probably have allocated a publicity role to one of our committee whose job it would have been to contact the local press and talk them into giving us coverage.
We had taken guidance from the Press Office that the best approach was to have our own photographer and issue our own press release, rather than invite representatives of the press to be present at the event. We might want to reconsider this next time.

Coasters

We commissioned a set of coasters, with the competition logo, as thank-you gifts for the teachers, sponsors and others who had helped make the competition a success.
They would also act as a permanent reminder of the BCS on the teachers' desks.
The coasters seemed to be well received (see box) but we need to consider whether the expense was justified.

Roles on the committee

• Did anyone feel they had too much/too little to do?
• Could the allocation of roles have been improved?

anything we did that was unneccessary

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comments

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