The Secret is Pasta!

Head of the Alleyn's Digital Academy, Dr Rob Atkinson shares how pupils at Alleyn’s and beyond our school community are collaborating as they build the tech and social skills to thrive in the modern workplace through the Alleyn’s Digital Academy.

Imagine a football stadium, in 3D, on your computer screen, where the pitch is to scale, and you can almost feel the excitement in the virtual stands. Now imagine you are at home, wearing a VR headset, “sitting” in the stadium, with your friends around you if you turn your head, but this experience is replicated for millions of people across the globe as they are watching the same match. If you miss a goal, you can rewind and watch it again. Bored with your seat? Choose another! 

Sounds exciting doesn’t it: imagine the possibilities? Well, this idea didn’t come from a 3D design house, but from five Year 9 and 10 pupils from Alleyn’s and one of our local state partner schools during our project showcase last week. As the pupils enthusiastically and expertly pitched their idea, I thought about the skills they had really learned over the past five weeks and although some of these were undoubtedly digital, far more were about learning to work with each other. 

This first iteration of our Digital Academy, which has been running since January, is playing a vital part in us testing and refining our vision to bring coding, enterprise and tech entrepreneurship more directly into the lives of our pupils and the lives of children beyond our school community who don’t have access to this kind of specialist learning in their day to day lives. 

Around 40 Alleyn’s parents, and their contacts, kindly gave up their time to speak to me as we formulated our plans. With expertise transcending the technology sector, from start-up mentors to funders, to creative designers and software developers, they told us that quite often the graduates they were employing knew about computer science but were not equipped with the skills they needed to thrive in the modern workplace. 

They said that if we wanted to make a real difference, the participants needed to experience problem solving, resilience and not giving up, but most importantly finding a problem worth solving by speaking to people at every stage, so that their ‘minimum viable products’ were actually going to be useful. The idea that we are more creative when we bounce ideas off each other than we can be alone, is not new, but it can be hard to square with the individual mastery that GCSE and A level exams require. 

And so, buoyed with this vision, the chorus of “can’t I work with my friends?” silence, or cold shoulders that we were met with was slightly disheartening if not that surprising from a group of 45 Year 8, 9 and 10 pupils from three different schools who didn’t know each other. The answer lay with my colleague Karen, who suggested we take them over to the dining hall half-way through the next session, so that they could sit in their groups, mixed up by school and year group and eat pasta together. Slowly but surely, the pupils got to know each other, and started to talk about their projects. Creative discussions started to happen without any cajoling. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t universal, but I’m sure it comes as no surprise that the winning entry in our showcase was from the group that were the most cohesive, collaborative, and loudest! 

The catalyst was Jason Knight (Spurgeon's 1989), an Alleyn’s alumnus who is a successful tech entrepreneur himself with a background in managing music acts in the 1990s. Jason told his story and stayed at the club to chat to the pupils about their ideas, inspiring them to change their world. As the pupils made their first steps with Figma, Canva and Sketchup, they realised that some of the quieter pupils were more expert than the seemingly more confident ones, and so these new-found experts were called upon to assist – their first steps at experiencing the ‘Agile Methodology’? That might be too bold a statement at this stage, but it’s a start! They certainly taught the teachers a thing or two too, as you might well have expected. 

Although we are by no means there yet, we have exciting plans afoot to develop the Digital Academy further so that we can reach even more young people, and we’d love to hear from you if you think you can help. I can honestly say that there are not many places I’d rather be on a Tuesday after school than hearing teenagers tell me about their brilliant ideas, knowing that the 21st century skills in digital literacy, (pasta-fuelled) team working and design thinking that we are fostering will help them stand out, regardless of their background.  

Find out more about the Alleyn's Digital Academy which was launched in January 2023, here.