Four Birkdale Entrepreneurs visit the Palace

3rd July 2013

A team of four pupils from Birkdale won the Entertainment Category of the inaugural TeenTech Awards which was held at the Royal Society in London recently.

The TeenTech Awards are an award winning, industry-led initiative, founded in 2008 by Maggie Philbin and Chris Dodson to help the -X Factor generation understand their true potential and the real opportunities available in the contemporary workplace. Of the thirty-six teams who made it through to the finals, eleven winning teams were invited to Buckingham Palace by TeenTech Patron HRH the Duke of York so that he could present them with their prizes personally. Also present at the finals were celebrity visitors Professor Brian Cox and James May who took a keen interest in all of the 36 teams' projects. The four who visited the Palace were Joshua Anderson, Philip Bladen, Micah De Silva and Ethan Yap (all Year 10) and they were accompanied by Miss Kathy McKay who is the teacher in charge of Enterprise at Birkdale and who is to be credited for enabling the team to achieve this accolade. After visiting the Palace and meeting Prince Andrew, Philip said: 'It was a fantastic day. Seeing inside Buckingham Palace was a memorable experience and to have the opportunity to meet Prince Andrew was tremendous.' Deep Focus is a new Year 10 Game Design Enterprise, which creates original game ideas using existing platforms that can be commercialised and sold to a wide target market. They have created a game called 'Infection' which runs on Omnicraftservers.com. The boys are currently building connections with Sony Play Station, Microsoft and Sheffield Hallam University and each of these companies are attracted by the advanced level of game construction and programming. Joshua Anderson said: 'Infection took months of programming and coding. Each person had a clearly defined role. We used all our own soundtracks, graphics, code and mechanics, YouTube videos, backgrounds and game strategies and we would now like to market the game so we invite everyone to 'Get Infected' and play the game .'