n 2013, I was invited by Microsoft to attend the Microsoft Skill Show, which took place at the NEC, Birmingham. It was a free event geared towards providing young people with opportunities in further education, skills and apprenticeships; and it was completely free! The Skills Show is the UK’s largest skills and careers event that takes place annually, its focus is to let young people ‘have a go’ at various activities and try to inspire them to choose a career path that suits them. I attended the event alongside Dan and Gordon Walker who were Student Partners; Lee Stott (my manager) and Simon Michael from the Developer Evangelism team. Our job whilst we were there was to demonstrate technologies such as Kodu, TouchDevelop, Project Spark, and AppStudio and occasionally dipping into Visual Studio and showing the attendees some real, live coding with its risks. The major aim was to make IT an attractive career prospect to young people. Project Spark received a lot of attention early on, especially with the younger attendees; they were fascinated by how easy it was to create their own game world and the characters within it.
Microsoft Skill Show team
I was assigned to work on Kinect skeleton movement features that allow students to see how Kinect’s camera recognises movements and visualises it on a screen. Simply showing the demos which are available in the Windows Kinect 1.8 SDK so short interactive demo of the Kinect Features Skeletal Tracking, Kinect Fusion 3D scanning + Face Mapping. I also ran daily workshops detailing an introduction to windows phone development especially for individuals that were new to the platform.
As the event gathered pace, I began to attract a lot of students who were interested in how Connect works and what they will be able to do with it. This had a great effect as the students enjoyed having something physical that they could interact with. In the space of three days, more than 75000 students, parents and teachers turned up for the event and I was able to showcase the usefulness of Kinect and other Microsoft software’s.
