Flex your Minecraft muscles at Bath Digital Festival on 15 February and turn your vision of Bath into a virtual reality.

BDF-LogoThe Bath Digital Festival is back this month for its fourth year, with a programme of events celebrating the local digital sector.

The Minecraft event is inviting people from across the city to take part in the competition which will run for 48 hours with prizes for the most creative, biggest, most historic and most futuristic creations. The entries will be judged by world famous YouTube gamers The Yogscast.

The competition is just one of many events and activities taking place across the city as part of Bath Digital Festival, which takes place between 12 and 19 February.

“We’re really keen to give the local community an opportunity to get involved and learn more about the exciting projects happening on their doorsteps”

 

“This year we have put together a programme of events with something to appeal to everyone,” said Oli Ward, director of the 2016 Bath Digital Festival. “The digital sector locally is developing a national and international reputation and we’re really keen to give the local community an opportunity to get involved, learn more about the exciting projects happening on their doorsteps, and enjoy being part of one of the UK’s most exciting digital clusters.”

Innovation showcase

The Bath and Bristol region is recognised as one of the leading tech clusters in Britain, and the festival aims to showcase, educate and inspire the industries and people that make the sector great.

The Bath Digital Festival plays a key role in supporting the development of this cluster, and looks to give families living in the region an opportunity to learn more about digital.

“Bath Digital Festival exciting programme demonstrates why our region is the UK’s only fast growing globally significant digital technology cluster”

 

Ben Shorrock, digital sector specialist at Invest Bristol & Bath (the inward investment agency for the Bristol & Bath region), said: “The Bristol and Bath digital technology cluster is establishing itself on the global stage as a place where innovative and ground-breaking ideas are born.

“Bath Digital Festival is an excellent showground for these innovations and this year’s exciting programme demonstrates why our region is the UK’s only fast growing globally significant digital technology cluster.”

Driving local innovation

This year, the festival will stage more than 30 events over the course of the week; and hopes to attract more than 2,500 students, families, tech sector employees and small business owners to Bath, to take part in workshops, talks, career days, competitions and social events.

Sparkinator3000_standing_01Not to mention, on 17 February, our very own annual SPARKies tech sector award ceremony will celebrate the best technology projects, companies and individuals in the region across 15 categories!

Dynamic digital challenges

Other events taking place over the course of the festival include a hackathon which will bring together local organisations, residents and the digital and creative sectors to highlight and solve local environmental challenges.

Bath-Hacked--945x836 The event, Bath: Hacked LOVES the Environment, will take place on 13 and 14 February, and will give participants the chance to develop new apps, visualisations and technologies and learn new skills from others.

There will also be talks on cyber law, web analytics, coding workshops and a digital technology career day which will inspire young people by giving them the opportunity to find out more about how to get started.

The Bath Digital Festival will run from 12-19 February 2016. For further details about the festival and to book tickets for events please visit www.bathdigitalfestival.com, or join the conversation on Twitter at @BathDigital.