Last week we hosted a Talent Debate organised by Business in the Community to stimulate the discussion around how to develop talent in the United Kingdom to be able to ensure the future competitiveness of the country within the global economy.

As part of the event, a number of exhibitors have been presenting their work and we were lucky enough to host two brilliant and very talented guys who presented the result their work with XNA.

Henrik and Jaspal (who are both in Year 10 - 15 Years Old – at the Prospect School in Reading) have been busy for two weeks before the event in learning how to create a game using XNA and implementing a game with it.

In a few words….

Henrik - Since Year 7 (11 years old) he has been programming games in Adobe Flash using ActionScript. He’s also used Dark Basic, but he never fully made a game using it - He has experience using Visual Basic and plays video games everyday and eventually wants a career in the video games industry. Oh yeah…and he made his first ever game using Microsoft PowerPoint when he was in Primary School (8 years old!)

Jaspal (A.K.A Jazz) - He can do some basic stuff in Flash and can use PHP, HTML and Visual Basic. Web design is his preferred choice, but he also enjoys the games design side of programming. He also started programming when he was very young and began looking into web development.

I found reading their blogs describing their experience really fascinating (it also reminds me a little of how I started programming myself, much longer ago than I like to admit).

At the end of the event, we showed them around the Microsoft Campus, had a nice lunch in one of our canteens and took them to the Windows Showroom to have a look at some cool consumer technologies that are showcased there.

It was really amazing to see how this guys are passionate about technology, enthusiast about what it is achievable with a bit of knowledge and a lot of creativity and hear about their stories on how they tried to hack in the school’s network :)

Before I close, I also want to mention their teacher Michael Smith, who has been supporting them all the way and is just as enthusiastic and passionate as Henrik and Jazz (see the below slideshow for a proof of that).