What is the Student Summer Sprint?

The story behind the event.

Student Summer Sprint is an online, week-long programme for sixth form students interested in technology. You'll get to take part in technical workshops to build your programming skills and work on a technical project throughout the week in a team with other participants. Each group will be guided through their project by a student mentor and an industry mentor. We've also organised sessions throughout the week covering different tech careers, university advice and guidance on CVs and applications.

Why we chose to organise this programme

As the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education of students across the UK, we believe this event will help bridge the gap between those entering their final year of A-Levels and those hoping to start university (or other paths). By taking part in this programme, you'll have access to Computer Science university students so you can find out more about studying technology-based degrees. By hosting the Student Summer Sprint, we hope you'll engage with the exciting project brief and how working in technology is challenging, rewarding and can change lives!

What do you mean by a sprint?

Good question - we're definitely not talking about sports here. The term sprint is actually part of agile software development.

Agile software development (and the associated methodologies) is an approach to project management that responds to the unpredictability of developing software. It uses iterative development where technical solutions and requirements are often changing.

Scrum is an agile framework, meaning it follows the principles described above. In Scrum, a sprint is a set time frame which members of a team complete a set of tasks from a list. The list is called a backlog.

Don't worry if this sounds confusing to you - we'll make sure to cover it during the week. By the end of the programme you'll have a better idea of what agile development is all about!

We've designed the project of this programme to work in an agile way, and you'll find out more about this later.

A sprint is a set time frame which members of a team complete a set of tasks from a list.