HOOLA-hoop #Microbit hooked up to @scratch 3 and projected on the big screen at @mercurytheatre.

That’s what our young people have been getting up to this summer, in the words of practitioner Frazer Merrick on Twitter earlier this month. Feeling lost? Let me explain…

We’re in the third year of hACkT, our digital summer school for young people aged 11 to 16.

Each year participants head to the Mercury Theatre for a week of digital creativity, working with local industry professionals to experiment with drama, video game design, Raspberry Pi’s, filmmaking, coding and more.

The 30 young people who took part this year worked with “creatives” from Signals Media, Teaboy Games, Limbo Education, Optic Matter and more, and we’re especially grateful to Essex Skills Board for fully funding bursary places for pupils from their target schools.

This year, the focus was on transferring young people’s love of digital gaming into the real world, culminating in an immersive digital experience for friends and family at the end of the week.

The aim was to take the social side of the video game experience and transform it into a creative experience using those same digital technologies.

Ultimately, we want to teach young people transferable skills that will support their future careers, while having a lot of fun in the process.

Some of our participants have come every year since 2016, for some this was the first time.

We hope it will be the first of many and it’s different every year.

This year’s sharing included homemade robot wars, a chat-bot murder mystery and a digital arcade.

The team at Optic Matter created a 3D scan of this immersive sharing which will soon be available to explore on our website, so you can take a look first hand.

And what’s it all for? At a time when there’s a local skills shortage in digital fields, our hope is to support the next generation of digital “creatives”; to give these young people access to professionals and organisations they might not otherwise be able to encounter; and to enable access to theatre through non-traditional pathways – all on a local level.

We believe in creating new ways of learning that will kickstart the careers of our next generation of digital entrepreneurs. Know a young person who might like to get involved?

Send them over to the Make It pages on our website – there’s never a dull moment.