The Summer Reading Challenge

The Reading Agency and Norfolk library and Information Service are excited to introduce Ready, Set, Read!, Summer Reading Challenge 2023; a celebration of innovation and imagination.

The Summer Reading Challenge takes place every year during the summer holidays and aims to support children's reading for pleasure and prevent a dip in reading over the six-week break. As well as supporting literacy, reading is a fantastic way to promote mental wellbeing and have fun.

To make the Summer Reading Challenge even more fun, we are holding lots of fun events and activities in our libraries and it's all free! See our Summer Reading Challenge activities. 

What activities were ICT Solutions involved with?

We were so excited to be involved with these events and it gave us at ICT Solutions the perfect opportunity to help Norfolk's young people get some experience in coding with game-based learning. What better way to do this then providing the Libraries with some brilliant kit and expertise in the form of Spheros; our robot footballs and access to Minecraft for Education for the day. 

Coding Spheros to play football

We gave each of our young people the use of a Sphero and an iPad for an hour. Using the block coding program within Sphero Education they were tasked with coding the Sphero (their football) to travel to each of their players in turn, whilst avoiding the opposition players and then to score a goal!

In the last 10 minutes of the sessions we set them a new task of imagining their Spheros were players and controlling their players to hit a softball into the oppositions goal. It was harder to do than it sounds!!

Escaping the mansion in the minecraft world

In our afternoon sessions they had a laptop each and access to the Hour of Code 2022 world, after a short tutorial they were thrust into a mansion. Using block code they had to control their bots within each room and were challenged to solve some puzzles to escape each room and eventually the mansion itself and get the reward of 1 million emeralds they were promised!

Coming soon to Norfolk schools and libraries...

Events featuring Lego!