Tri Computers at the BETT Show

Yesterday we sent a team of engineers to BETT 2015 with the purpose of finding some new, exciting products for us to share with you!

The BETT show, “Bringing Education & Technology Together”, is an event in which hundreds of companies from the IT/Technology sector come together to pitch their unique ideas to anyone who works with education. It’s attended by school staff and pupils, as well as companies that provide IT support for schools – which is exactly what we do!

The event was hugely popular. Very busy, full of excited techno-enthusiastic people from all over Europe. The first things that caught our eye were some of the huge interactive displays, which were obviously going to be a major focus of the event this year.

Numerous manufacturers from all over the world pitched their interactive displays to us, explaining why their displays were the best value for money. Some screens had incredible resolutions, some were bundled with very impressive software. One presenter even asked me to punch the screen as hard as I could, to demonstrate the strength of its toughened glass!

All very impressive, and all all relevant to the needs of our customers.

On the other hand, there were still some very impressive projectors. Notably a “pocket size projector” made by Dell, which was small enough to fit in my hand, projected a fully HD image onto a wall with a display up to 2 metres wide!

My favourite gadget of the day was ‘Oculus Rift’ which I was able to get my hands on play with. Oculus Rift is a vitual reality headset. I was skeptical at first, but as soon as I put them on I was truly amazed – the virtual reality was incredible. It genuinely felt like I was inside the game and I quite quickly forgot that I was in public, becoming quite immersed in the virtual world. As you can imagine, I managed to significantly embarrass myself in the space of about 5 minutes!

We then attended a fantastic talk led by Ray Chambers, a teacher who regularly uses Minecraft within his classroom to teach his pupils whilst keeping them engaged through the use of technology. He explained how he has been using Minecraft in every subject he teaches, and has now started classes teaching basic code to his primary school students!

All in all BETT was a great event, and we’re excited to be bringing some of the products we discovered to new and existing customers in the very near future.

– Harvey Ryan