Taking Control at Christmas Bytes

Entertainment and learning rolled into one
28, 29, 30 December 2017

Taking control is the theme of the fun-filled three-day Bytes Festival between Christmas and New Year at The National Museum of Computing on Bletchley Park. The forward-looking museum will be buzzing each afternoon between 28 and 30 December 2017 with parents, sons and daughters coding robots, programming Minecraft and experimenting with the future of voice control and response. Learning has never been so much fun.

Cubetto Robot Takeover On the afternoon of 28 December, the robots take over. Drop-in workshops for families will give them the chance to play with Cubetto and code the robots’ actions. Free registration as part of the usual Museum entrance fee: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cubetto-the-coding-robot-takeover-tickets...

Hour of Code with Minecraft On Friday afternoon 29 December, the global Code.org network will introduce a brand-new Minecraft activity with different sessions for boys and girls of different ages so that anyone from 8 to 13 can take part in an hour-long workshop exploring Minecraft through coding. Free registration as part of usual Museum entrance fee: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/codeorgs-2017-hour-of-code-tickets-401865...

Spoken Syntax will be the Museum’s last event of 2017 on Saturday afternoon 30 December and will point the way to the future of voice control and response with Alexa and Echo. A crack team from The Open University will show how all the family and control gadgets in a way you never thought possible. Free registration as part of usual Museum entrance fee: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/spoken-syntax-can-you-hear-the-echo-ticke...

Registering for all events is recommended to ensure of a reserved place. Registration is free, and the usual Museum entrance fee can be paid on the day. Special discounted Bytes family tickets are available on the door. The whole of the Museum is open during the three-day Bytes Festival.

About The National Museum of Computing

The National Museum of Computing, located on Bletchley Park, is an independent charity housing the world's largest collection of functional historic computers, including the rebuilt Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer, and the WITCH, the world's oldest working digital computer. The Museum enables visitors to follow the development of computing from the ultra-secret pioneering efforts of the 1940s through the large systems and mainframes of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and beyond. The Museum is housed in Block H, regarded by Historic England as one of England's top 100 'irreplaceable places'.

The Museum runs a highly successful Learning Programme for schools and colleges and promotes introductions to computer coding amongst young people to inspire the next generation of computer scientists and engineers.

Sponsors of the Museum have included Bletchley Park Science and Innovation Centre, Sophos, Bloomberg, CreateOnline, Ceravision, Fujitsu, InsightSoftware.com, Ocado Technology, FUZE, 4Links, Google UK, IBM, NPL, HP Labs, and BCS.

Outside the long school holidays, the whole Museum is open to the public from 12 noon – 5 pm on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays, spring and summer Bank Holidays and during long school holidays. The Colossus and Tunny galleries are open daily. Public and private Guided Tours are available and bookable online – see the website or the iPhone app for details. Educational and corporate group visits are available by prior arrangement.

For more information, see www.tnmoc.org and follow @tnmoc on Twitter and The National Museum of Computing on Facebook and Google+.

Media Contacts

Stephen Fleming, Palam Communications, for The National Museum of Computing
01635 299116
s.fleming@palam.co.uk