Last weekend was Electromagnetic Field, the UK’s main Hacker/maker camp. It’s an outstanding opportunity for meeting up with tinkerers, coders and makers from across the UK and beyond. I was at the first EMF (in 2012, blog post here) talking about women in tech, and went back to this one to talk about schools outreach and the work we’re doing with kids and families. I spoke about schools and kids engagement in general, but also more specifically about our EU playfulcoding project. You can see my talk here:
And you can view the slides here, if you just want slides, not talk.
The talk was well-received but not full, but that’s fine – one of the cool things about EMFcamp is the sheer range of stuff going on. Over the course of the weekend I went to talks on computer history, quantum effects in imaging, IT security from a sociological standpoint, penetration testing, hardware hacking, animating dinosaurs and the mathematics of the Simpsons. I also went to hands-on workshops on VR, deep machine learning, card-based reasoning (“having daft ideas”) and paper circuits. These were all part of the official program – submitted and approved before the event, allowing people to schedule and so on.
There were also lots of minor “installation” type hacks around the place, and a whole heap of drop in activities. I played some computer games in the retro gaming tent (Sonic the hedgehog), went in a musical ball pit, watched fire pong, and generally strolled around the site going WOW.
I had never been in a ball pit before. I am so going to make one of these.
“The Robot Arms” was the name of the camp bar, and it had an API so you could look online to see how much beer had been sold. Someone even wrote a script to calculate how many drinks had been sold in the last minute so you could tell how busy it was without going down to check. All the barstaff and indeed everyone at the event were volunteers which gives the whole thing a really nice cooperative feeling. I was sat eating my veggie breakfast in the food area on Sunday morning and someone asked for help setting out the chairs at the main stage, and about 10 of us just got up and did it. Loads of my friends there did shifts on the bar, or marshalling in the carpark (I spoke, and figured that was probably enough:). At the closing ceremony Jonty (one of the main organisers) asked everyone who’d volunteered or spoken to stand up, and I swear about 25% of the people there did. This really did make for a really friendly event.
What a cool pub sign, eh?
Much to my embarrassment, I fell out of a hammock installation on the last night though. I was fine getting in there, but the dismount was … inelegant.
This has made my return to Aberystwyth a couple of days late, via the excellent first aid tent and the A&E at Guildford hospital (Royal Surrey). Nothing’s broken [edit: turned out i did actually break a rib] my gosh it’s all a bit bruised.
my opinion of hammocks is not positive
In all – I loved it, again. I’ll definitely go in 2018.