Bringing Computer Science to life for girls across the UK through ballet
Ready Salted Code provides a creative opportunity for Computer Science Education, introducing a more artistic approach to STEM education. The project “The Art of Computer Science”, was jointly funded by Google's RISE award for Computer Science Education and the Arts Council England. The RISE Award enabled the development of educational resources and workshops taken from the ballet to help increase awareness of the new national curriculum for computer science launched in September 2014 through England and Wales. The result was the production of a unique piece of work combining classical ballet with wearable technology and a portfolio of resources for educators across the UK. The online resources in the form of DIY projects and link educational resources enable online access to creative computer science educational projects. All the code for the data-visualisation, kinect server and wearables are open source and free to use.
Students from Battle Abbey School aged between 12 and 19 worked together to create a ballet called [arra]stre, a classical ballet based on computer science theory. The ballet is entirely focused around the five key concepts in computer science, dancing the theories of boolean and binary, algorithms, debugging and big data and computational thinking. The show integrated wearable technology, data visualisations and live motion capture to create a dynamic and dramatic performance.
Without the RISE award and Google's support Ready Salted Code would have not been able to achieve and produce all the amazing productions and workshops that we have delivered so far. The journey has only just started.