This is a very quick heads-up about what to see at Bett 2017, not simply because I'm short of time, but also because I have not had time to look at these products further.
I saw quite a few things yesterday. One looked reasonably good but isn't on a stand anywhere, a couple evoked my inner "so what?", and one just angered me because of the preposterous assumptions on which it was based.
So having at least initially sorted the wheat from the chaff, here are two worth checking out I think. They are both in the Bett Futures area.
Studentnomics is a horrible neologism following the current lamentable trend of creating ugly portmanteau words. However, the free app, created by three 17-18 year olds, enables a student to look up any school qualification (I'm not sure if it deals with outliers like Cisco Academy Training, mind you) and find out what the syllabus is, and what resources the exam board has made available for students.
Erase All Kittens sounds rather gruesome but in fact is a game designed to teach coding. For the last couple of years in my workshops on how to make Computing interesting (a novel concept judging by some of the syllabuses I've seen), I've been suggesting that teachers set self-referential problems. To take an example outside of computing, there's a book about how to solve cryptic crosswords whose table of contents is in the form of a cryptic crossword.
Well, EAK has done that with a game: children change the game by changing the coding behind it, as they're playing it. The nice thing is that unlike other examples of this sort of thing that I've seen, it's designed to appeal to children rather than people who are happy to sit in front of a computer for three days surrounded by pizza boxes and beer cans.
I hope to review these (and other products) properly once Bett is over and if I'm given a reviewer's log-in, but I just wanted to publish these notes now while Bett is still on.
And don't forget: my book, Education Conferences: Teachers' Guide to Getting the Most out of Education Conferences, is still only 99p for this week only. (Please note: that link takes you to Amazon, and includes my Amazon Affiliate code.)