The Workshop helps Christmas Lectures
A WEBSITE designed by a Sheffield company for the renowned Royal Institution (Ri) Christmas Lectures is being used in a nationwide experiment to compare people’s skills against those of a computer.
The Workshop, in Sheffield, has been working on the project since April for the Royal Institution of Great Britain in conjunction with Microsoft Research.
The website, which involves a number of ingenious, interactive games based around the theme of computer science, has just gone fully live.
Additional interactive challenges designed by The Workshop, focusing on the five related 2008 Christmas Lectures – ‘Breaking the speed limit’, ‘Chips with everything’, ‘The ghost in the machine’, ‘Untangling the web’ and ‘Digital intelligence’, are available on the website.
Craig Dall, project manager at The Workshop, said it was incredibly exciting to work on such a ground-breaking project for such an historic and well-respected organisation as the Royal Institution.
“What makes it even more rewarding is that we are able to show the rest of the country that Sheffield is right at the cutting edge of web design,” he said.
It is the fourth year running that The Workshop has been involved in the Ri Christmas Lectures. The company is also responsible for producing 2,500 interactive educational DVDs of the annual lecture series for distribution to secondary schools across the UK.
The five lectures are being presented to live audiences between now and December 17 and will be televised on Channel 5 on consecutive evenings between December 29 and January 2 from 7.15pm.
The historic Ri Christmas Lectures have been running since 1825 and have been presented over the years by a host of distinguished scientists, including Michael Faraday, Frank Whittle, Carl Sagan and David Attenborough. They have been aired on television since 1966.
