BIMA Digital Day 2021

By Account Director, Saskia Jury•18 Nov 2021•4 mins read

On Monday myself and Creative Director, Jack Ashdown had the absolute pleasure of visiting Hans Price Academy in Weston-super-Mare to facilitate BIMA’s Digital Day 2021.

The aim of Digital Day is to give Year 10's an insight into the rich and diverse world of digital careers; something that Hans Price Academy’s Year 10s may have only had an inkling about at the start of the day. We gave them a short introduction to ourselves, Great State and the industry. It’s safe to say, they were pretty impressed with the breadth of our work on the Royal Navy, Honda, UNHCR and hadn’t realised the wealth of roles available in digital beyond coding. They were less impressed by the fact that I don’t play Minecraft, despite claiming to be a gamer.

We then helped our students walk through Discover, Design and Deliver phases against a brief set by WWF. The brief challenged our Year 10 students to use digital and technology solutions to help people better understand the true environmental impact of products and services, in turn allowing households, schools, universities and businesses make better choices for the planet.

Throughout the day I was delighted with how engaged the students were, and how quickly they got stuck into productive ways of working; sharing tasks between themselves and leaning on each other’s strengths.

The ideas coming out of the Discover section included supermarket self-scanner software, games with real-life interventions, and even a Discord Bot. In the Design section we had wireframing, logo creation, website prototypes and character designs.

What I was most impressed with however, was the Deliver section, where the students created Dragon’s Den-style presentations to pitch back to the rest of the class (and us, as acting WWF ‘clients’). Before we could even jump in with critique and questions, the other students were giving their classmates a grilling with highly intelligent, critical questions that demonstrated their depth of understanding and knowledge about digital products. It was a tough decision to choose an overall winner; we had a real variety of ideas:

Branch: an eco-search engine that would use profits to plant trees (with the perfect tagline, “Canopy’s the limit”). We did unfortunately have to tell them that the idea was so good, it already exists (www.ecosia.org). But what agency hasn’t had this before, eh?
Planet Adventure: a fun and easy environmental game that gives you gems for carrying out real-life tasks like recycling that can be used to get discounts on sustainable products. This team created an animated logo and promotional website within 45 minutes to embed into their presentation!
Envo Bot: a bot on Discord that provides gamers with advice, tips, facts about the environment and their carbon footprint (using WWF’s existing footprint calculator technology) and the ability to donate to WWF based on a range of Discord commands
Earth Hero: a WWF microsite with more detail on your carbon footprint, how to track and improve it, including a kid’s section with age-appropriate videos and graphics (this team in particular impressed us with extensive wireframing and UX knowledge throughout the day).
Supermarket scanning software: software marketed to supermarkets that provides carbon footprint information when using self-scanners and providing lower footprint alternatives to encourage changes in purchasing behaviours.

By the end of the day, I’d earmarked three students with a bright future in UX, and had one come up to me to quietly to say he was “definitely going to get a job in digital in the future.” It was wonderfully rewarding and I am still reeling from how talented the students are. The whole event has reaffirmed that the future of digital is an exciting one, with these lifelong digital natives being the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.