Gen Z whizz kids

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Digital Day, hosted by BIMA, is an annual event where companies and schools are paired across the country to try and educate kids from 13-16 years old about careers in the digital landscape. 

The event promised teamwork, challenging problem solving and ultimately a lot of fun and it did not disappoint.

Each year, as part of the day, students complete one of three sponsored challenges for a chance to be crowned BIMA Digital Day champions and also receive a range of amazing prizes. This year, Union Digital were paired with George Heriots in Edinburgh. 

The 2019 Digital Day challenges given to BIMA were created by Wimbledon, EPAM and Microbit & WLL. 

The challenges that were distributed to the students were as follows:

  1. Wimbledon: myWimbledon is Wimbledon’s personalised digital experience. It allows fans to login to wimbledon.com and the Wimbledon apps and get access to benefits and tickets. But what more could it do? How could we make the app appeal to the next generation of sports fans? And how could we use their relationship with Wimbledon to encourage more people to get active? We’d like you to design myWimbledon for the younger generation.
  2. EPAM: So many people risk missing out on the creative, fulfilling, secure jobs that are available in the digital industry, simply because they don’t know about them! They don’t know that digital doesn’t just mean working in IT, or that 80% of tomorrow’s jobs don’t even exist yet. Come up with a campaign that’d get YOU inspired. Think about what you found interesting today. What you didn’t know yesterday. How would you get that message out to people outside this room?
  3. Microbit & WLL: If we don’t protect our oceans, they can’t protect us. Technology can help. And so can you. Develop a prototype that can help solve one of the following problems: • How do we remove plastic from the ocean? • How do we prevent trawlers taking too many fish from the sea? • How do we change the way people think and act, so we stop polluting the oceans?

Union Digital took a group of S3 Business Management and Accounting students through a day-long sprint which involved Discover, Design and Delivery sessions where the students worked in groups to solve the challenge they had been allocated. 

We were blown away by the students and their work. The day was a real insight into how students even as young as 14 were excited and energised when looking at a task that not only challenged their strategic thinking but also made them think outside the box in terms of demographics, branding and competitor research. 

A lot of the presentations involved a really high level of strategy and thorough thought out processes of how they approached their challenge, what research they did and how they thought about the target market and what would attract their interest to the product/brand.

Union Digital got the best roles of the day and got to play Craig Revel Horwood and Shirely Ballas as the judges come presentation time. We ended the day with 3 groups being chosen to be put forward to the national competition.