Students awarded bursaries for Digital Training at BBC worth £4,500

13 November 2015

As part of the One for One Digital Skills programme run by Freeformers and sponsored by the BBC, students from the Graphic Design department were recently awarded three bursaries, worth £4,500, to attend an intensive day of digital training at BBC Broadcasting Place, London.

Students Ryan Prandle, Max Palmer and Lewis Langan, who have all completed A Levels at The Sixth Form College and are now studying the Foundation Diploma in Art, Design & Media, were chosen by our recent visiting Graphic Designers based on their performance in the “Battle of the Brands 2015” brief, to attend a day of workshops aimed at introducing more young people to the digital skills sector.

During the day, students were invited to attend talks from leading BBC Digital Designers and had the opportunity to become part of the initial testing group for the BBC’s new online home for digital skills, Mixital. This enhanced the students’ understanding of how the graphic design skills they acquired at A Level could be developed to address the current skills gap within digital design, using some of the skills they would develop during the workshops that day.

For the remainder of the morning, students participated in an App prototyping workshop, led by Louis and Sarah from Freeformers, which covered everything from how apps generate income to wireframing and prototyping. Students had the opportunity within this session to work with higher education students and graduates from across the country to develop and pitch their own app design ideas, which were then judged by the head of BBC Digital.

Following a creative morning, the students switched in the afternoon to something altogether more technical in an App development workshop; giving the students the tools and understanding they would need to develop their own site from scratch using a combination of HTML and CSS.

Leanne Jones, Graphic Design Tutor at the College, commented, “This was a fantastic opportunity for the students, as well as myself, to build upon and use our existing design knowledge to address the digital focused areas of Graphic Design. Since the project, I have implemented an App Design scheme of work for AS and A2 groups, which aims to develop some of the skills that the students and I began to explore during our day with The BBC and Freeformers.”

Student, Lewis Langan; who achieved double Distinction grades in ICT and an A in Graphic Design at A Level; enjoyed the combination of digital and creative media commenting, “During the workshops at the BBC I was able to combine my interest in Computing and Graphic Design in a way that challenged my current understanding, as well as my creative abilities.”

Fellow student Max Palmer, who achieved A* grades in Graphic Design and Mathematics and an A in Film Studies at A Level, added, “I enjoyed being able to work with other students and graduates from a range of backgrounds to develop some of my initial design ideas. Being able to work with a wider range of people in a creative environment helped ensure a broader end user was considered in my work.”