Robots help York children learn to code

The event, which is part of this year’s Festival of Ideas, will run between 6pm and 7pm see children look at and work with a variety of robots as they learn code and robotics at a fun family workshop.

The workshop is the latest coding event in the city following successful events at York Explore Library Learning Centre and the National Railway Museum and more as part of an exciting Code York programme to help people across York learn to code.

During the fun session children will be meeting and viewing many different types of robots that will be on show from the University of York’s Robotics Lab including a humanoid robot named NAO who will be demonstrating its abilities with football, dancing and speech; a scorpion robot, a Rubik’s cube solving robot and much more. In addition there will also be a competition with an exciting family prize.

The event is for anyone aged 7-14 years old that has an interest in coding and children are being urged to book their place at the free event now at www.yorkchildrensuniversity.eventbrite.co.uk to avoid disappointment as places are going fast.

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What’s on in York: Barnes Wallis in Yorkshire

York Explore Library : Wed 15 Jun : 6.15pm – 7.45pm : £6 each (or £5 with a Yorkcard)

Jun 15_Wallis Off Duty At Howden Airship Shed Beyond 1927 Barnes Wallis (1887-1979) is probably the best-known British engineer of the twentieth century. Remembered as the inventor of the water-skipping mine that broke German dams in 1943, the public’s view of him has been influenced by the 1954 film The Dam Busters wherein Michael Redgrave portrayed a gentle, slightly abstracted genius at odds with bureaucracy.

The real Wallis was a different kind of figure, and for the last eight years Richard Morris has been working on a new account of his life. Morris’s forthcoming biography draws on sources that have not previously been seen, of which earlier historians made no use, or which were still classified when earlier accounts were written.

In this talk Morris will look at a special period in Wallis’s life: the building of the R100 airship at Howden in the later 1920s. The first stages of that project overlapped with Wallis’s courtship of Molly Bloxam, who was seventeen when he first met her in 1921, while the airship’s construction coincided with the early years of their marriage. In the lecture, love, engineering and Yorkshire are found intertwined.

For more information contact York Explore Library on (01904) 552800 or archives@exploreyork.org.uk

To book tickets please visit www.yortime.org.uk

What’s on in York: Keeping Time in the Georgian House

As part of the 2016 Festival of Ideas: “Tick Tock”

Fairfax House : Wed 15 Jun : 7.00pm – 9.00pm : Adults: £14.00 : Friends & Members: £12.00 Ticket price includes a glass of wine.

June 15_Keeping Time In this special guest lecture for Fairfax House, Dr John C Taylor OBE, one of the world’s most renowned inventors and foremost horologists, will explore the keeping of time, taking a specific look within Fairfax House, suggesting what clocks the Fairfax family might have owned or acquired.

Revolutionary advances in timekeeping during the Georgian Age gave to the world new ways to calculate, co-ordinate and measure time. An affluent social elite, moving between parties and events at the theatre, racecourse and assembly rooms, demanded accurate timekeeping to regulate their activities, making the ownership of a clock or watch not just a luxury commodity and symbol of status, but also a necessity.

Dr John C Taylor OBE FREng is one of the world’s most prolific inventors. His bi-metal thermostat controls in the humble kettle are used throughout the world over one billion times a day. Dr Taylor is also the leading expert on the work of John Harrison, an early pioneer of timekeeping and sea clocks. This led him to design and help build the Corpus Chronophage, a three metre-high clock that is displayed in an exterior wall of Corpus Christi College building at Cambridge University. His company won four Queen’s Awards for Export and Innovation. Dr Taylor is no stranger to Fairfax House and has lent his wooden Harrison precision longcase clock to the exhibition: ‘Keeping Time’ in 2013.

For more information about John please visit his website www.johnctaylor.com

To make a booking please phone 01904 655543 or email info@fairfaxhouse.co.uk.

To buy tickets in person you can also visit our Museum Shop.

For more information about Fairfax House please visit w www.fairfaxhouse.co.uk f