14/06/2024
Busk Stops - Willington Arts Festival 2016.
Creating connections through education and events. This page follows our international teaching journey. Design is in our DNA.
Creating connections through education and events.
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We are an international social enterprise from the beautiful town of Belper in Derbyshire, UK. Our mission is to inspire creativity, spark curiosity, ignite passion, generate innovation and connect with people through global education and community events.
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Why node56? NODE/ is our
point of interconnectedness.
/DE56 is the area code where we connected.
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node56 came into contact through youth and community projects delivered at The Drop Inn, a grass roots youth organisation. The company evolved into running community events and projects across the UK, delivering safe event training in schools and codeveloped an alternative education programme for a pupil referral unit (PRU). "Realise everything connects to everything else" ~ Da Vinci
We expanded and started designing educational resources after relocating in China and teaching full-time at international schools. We have taught Primary and Secondary, specialising in ESL/EAL (English), Multimedia and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics). Our award-winning, creative collective have organised, promoted and produced over 350 bespoke events and developed and delivered over 250 projects. We make valuable connections though building immersive and inclusive environments. We enjoy branding all of our events and projects, giving each activity a unique identity. "Design is thinking made visual" ~ Saul Bass. The node56 abstract logo is made up of location pins, rotating in a circle which represents perpetual motion. We are proud of where we came from, travelling keeps our company agile and always learning through exploration. We adapt to different surroundings and keep continuously r/evolving. We are currently transitioning from local to global projects. Learn to travel and travel to learn - the world is our classroom.
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Our HQ and majority of operations are currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Busk Stops - Willington Arts Festival 2016.
We’ve been watching and supporting one of our students make their own Rube Goldberg machine, they didn’t finish it in time for the online competition, however, their celebration once it worked looked like they just won the World Cup🏆
Throwback to the start of our Three Peaks Challenge, raising money for Mind charity 💚
We built a 3D maze for mBot robots.
Our students had to programme the robots to follow a black line and detect objects in front of them to solve the maze.
Way back when we organised a fun event at our school in Guangzhou celebrating the art of STEM education.
Busk Stops at Belper Arts Trail 2016.
Five years ago, Team Unicorn were training around Stanton Moor, Derbyshire for their National Three Peaks Challenge, raising money for Mind charity.
We’ve been making more Doodle-Droids with our Sphero LittleBit kits.
We've been recently painting and doodling with robots.
This Lego Drawing machine is something to aspire to next.
LEGO SPIROGRAPH
This is seriously so cool! It's like a spirograph, except better.
LINK: https://frugalfun4boys.com/build-lego-design-drawing-machine/
Way back when we designed a stage for our friends at Discotech. These leaves surrounding g the stage were illuminated and dancing to a sound reactive UV light.
This idea was inspired by our own UV sound reactive Space themed stage design a few years before, and the massive UV Graffiti wall we created at the Drop Inn youth centre for our Safe Rave youth events.
We love using UV paint and UV lights 😎
Edit: Bassmeant Sessions - Long Eaton 2018.
Open deck youth event + live DJ workshops.
Recently, we’ve been working on a charity project with a village school here in Tbilisi.
We organised team building activities led by our students and then we all had a picnic by the lake with pizza and ice-cream.
The students received gift bags with stationery and a toy in.
This was a meaningful collaboration in our community.
We look forward to more projects soon.
We used to managed the stage at Belper Goes Green in our hometown years ago, it was always a busy time of year for us with festivals and community events.
This event was always a highlight of the year, the BGG team was a pleasure to work with, we met so many amazing people and saw so many incredible live acts.
We were also impressed with their solar powered and bicycle powered stages.
Thank you for all the wonderful memories 💚
Belper Goes Green is next weekend, check their page for more information.
😎 🙌 🇮🇪
Safe Raves - 2009-2013 - A National award winning youth event at The Drop Inn, Belper.
We definitely have enough random small plastic items to open a stall now. The students' enterprise week is coming up in June 😎
We love all these 3D doodles our students are making with 3Doodler 🙌
Flashback to our students enjoying exploring science through augmented reality with MERGE Cubes.
Edit: Bassmeant Sessions - Long Eaton 2015.
Open deck youth event + live DJ workshops.
Throwback to the Rogues Hideout creative workshops at Bearded Theory festival.
Now we are no longer involved we are free to be roaming Rogues, we've traded festivals in for more travel adventures, it's a fair trade after organising the stage from the other side of the world for two years. The world is our classroom.
We are very grateful for the opportunities to work at festivals and expand our huge portfolio of creative workshops and educational projects, we met some amazing people and friends for life, we will cherish those memories.
📸 Theo
Throwback to when we built a two level robot arena in Guangzhou for playing Monster Hunter with mBots.
Part time casual work
We're looking to do more events and festivals over the next few years, in Derby And Amber Valley.
If you're interested in getting involved, hands on, then private message us here. Tell us what you're up to, what you're interested in etc
We spend a lot of our time on transforming areas for events to make them look as good as they can, working with and talking to people at the events to help them get involved and managing the activities.
So we're after people who are engaging, flexible and have some flair.
We can’t wait to see this 3D animation finished, the models are looking great.
This idea all came about because Tom hasn’t seen the new DuckTales, we know, how can he run an animation afterschool club without seeing this masterpiece?!
Instead the student have decided to make their own version just so Tom will watch DuckTales.
EDIT - youth and community safe event training programme 2012-2018.
We ran this project in different youth centres and schools across Derbyshire.
The project aim is to encourage young people to collaborate as a team, design, promote, produce and manage their own events to showcase their creative talent.
We enjoyed travelling to Baku, Azerbaijan over the bank holiday weekend 🇦🇿
Usually this is one of the busiest weekends of the year, it’s nice to get our bank holidays back and focus on what makes us happy 😃☀️
When we’re not teaching we love to visit new places. We absolutely loved the Azerbaijani contrasting architecture and enjoyed visiting fascinating museums and inspiring art galleries.
The world is our classroom 🌍🎓😎✈️
The Rogues Hideout - rogues gallery 2015-2023.
RH1: Pirate Mutiny 2015.
RH2: Stars In Their Eyes 2016.
RH3: Mobsters & Lobsters 2017.
RH4: Mythical Creatures 2018.
RH5: Disco Divas 2019.
RH6: Eastern Connection 2022.
RH7: Fairytales & Fables 2023.
Tbilisi
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This week has been book week at our school. All primary classes contributed a video the students had created. Of course Year 5A’s entry needed to include unicorns. 🦄 The students illustrated pictures, recorded lines they read from the book and attached jewellery elastic to unicorns to make them move. 🦄 Well done Year 5A for your hard work. 🦄 #unicorn #storytime #bookweek #reading #filmmaking #node56
Connecting Creativity. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ We're a creative group who specialise in bespoke events, alternative education and community projects. We love networking with people and exploring new ideas through art and music, we aim to build platforms to elevate, educate and connect through creativity. ------------------------------------------
Pre-node - Phase 01: Foundation For Youth Innovation (2008-2013).
A group of creative youth volunteers came into contact through thedropinn.org a youth charity and organisation. It was at this youth and community centre we started delivering exciting projects from U.V graffiti walls, to under 18 ‘Safe Rave’ nights with DJ workshops, build-a-band workshops and band nights.
After a few years of very successful National Award winning youth projects our team started to expand our services and reach out to other areas offering workshops at festivals and running stages for big community events. Although this was still all focused on young people and The Drop Inn it was starting to evolve into something else.
We started running over 18 nights and big fundraising events which were designed to support the youth charity and organisation but caused some minor confusion running them as The Drop Inn youth centre. In May 2011 we got a huge opportunity to run an arena stage at Bearded Theory. After a successful weekend at the festival we started the motion to create a separate social enterprise that had the freedom to expand into other areas and help deliver services to wider communities while still supporting the youth charity at the heart of it.
node56 was founded in 2011 but did not become active until 2013 with the official launch event.
Why node56? NODE/ is our connecting point. /DE56 is the area we connected.
------------------------------------------ The Three Media Monkeys - Phase 02: Events, Media, Training (2013-2017).
Node56’s first official launch event was FreeFall festival on September 21st 2013. FreeFall was a very popular music and arts festival which celebrated live music, DJs, VJing, live graffiti and had a few stalls. It became an annual celebration which FreeFell on the 21st of different months.
The node56 brand logo wasn’t developed until 2015. It was created to represent the three core services Events /Media / Training, as well as the three directors;
We each continued to deliver exciting creative workshops across the East Midlands and started developing new unique events. The Safe Rave youth project was rolled out county wide and expanded as well as rebranded as the Edit youth project to incorporate a wider range of creative workshops. Running parallel to the Edit project we worked in partnership with The Drop Inn which was converted into a PRU (Pupil Referral unit) to deliver creative lessons for our joined alternative education programme EdDi.
In 2014 we took over Jasper Jam and expanded it by introducing big themed stages and promoting it to become one of the most popular open mic jam nights in the county. This was followed by launching a more intimate open mic night called The Sunday Late Club at a second venue which was a huge step forward influencing a lot of other Sunday live music nights in Belper. The success of these open platform music nights evolved into running a regular weekly live gig sequence which we used to discover and promote original music with a mix of some classic covers. Our Live Music Lock-up became one of the most popular regular live music nights in Belper and by far the most diverse offering a huge range of live music genres and styles. It established the perfect structure to then support the big community events. The live acts who performed at these gigs were able to perform on bigger stages at the community events which was only made possible through the sponsorship through the Live Music Lock-up event brand. We branded our community event support package BelperLive.
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Community Collaborations - Phase 03: Connecting Creativity (2016 - 2019).
Due to other commitments Paul and Jasper stepped down as directors in 2016/17 so node56 was looking to wind things down with Tom also having a full time job as well. At the same time we had already connected with a number of other great people like SlobDog who formed a partnership and helped support all the larger scale events. During this transition we stopped both our open mic nights to focus on the Live Music Lock-up and BelperLive community events. We also had to stop delivering most workshops except for the creative workshops we delivered as the Rogues Hideout at Bearded Theory which we expanded. In 2016 we got involved in Bearded Theory’s Festival School. This was a huge turning point for Node56 as it would come to influence our future direction into delivering more workshops, developing teaching resources and moving back into educational services.
The only events we delivered were mainly all under the same roof at The George & Dragon, this venue effectively became our new HQ. We were running regular events at this venue while forming a solid partnership were the venue also helped support and sponsor bigger community event stages. In return we were having lots of fun constantly changing and reshaping the stage for their themed events, constantly pushing the stage design, making them bigger and better every time. We introduced a few more successful event brands like Rocktoberfest which became the biggest heavy rock and real ale night in Belper. We began working with other groups and organisations, helping support more events outside of Belper. We also developed our own version of Busk Stops which we ran up to 10 stages for Belper Arts Festival at it’s peak in 2018. All these events and projects continued up until the end of 2018.
node56 events: • Live Music Lock-up (live gigs). • Jasper's Jam (live jam night). • The Sunday Late Club (open mic). • FreeFall (music & arts festival). • Rocktoberfest! (annual beer festival).
Other events: • Belper Food Festival (BelperLive). • The Belper Games (BelperLive). • Belper Goes Green Eco Festival (BelperLive). • Bearded Theory Festival (Rogues Hideout). • Belper Arts Trail (BuskStops). • Matlock Bath Music Festival (BuskStops). ------------------------------------------ Post-node - Phase 04: Creative, Community, Education (2019 - Present).
We’ve ran 270+ events, designed over 200+ posters and promotions, created 50+ event brands and built 30+ unique stage production designs. We absolutely love everything about the last 6 years, the people we have met, the art and music we have been surrounded by, pushing ourselves with bigger challenges, having lots of creative fun and we have enjoyed promoting the great team collaborations behind all these events and projects. Thank you to each and everyone of you who has been there for us and we really hope you enjoyed it all so far.
The Drop Inn youth centre has now closed so we have lost our solid foundation. We don’t want to completely lose our roots and want to return to the source of community creativity that created our social enterprise. We are rEvolving, turning our first full circle by starting back at the beginning strengthening our own community roots, we’ll be focussing back on more creative workshops, community projects and alternative education.
Our last event was FreeFall:Departure which marked our 6th anniversary, it’s also our last official direct node56 event for a while with the exception of one event brand continuation. The next few years will be a bit quieter while we re-establish ourselves and take steps in a new direction. The first big step is introducing not one but two new directors. Andrea Fox MBE the founder of The Drop Inn will be continuing her community legacy through a series of community projects. We also have Danielle Atterby joining as a new director. Danielle has qualified as a teacher and already been a huge part of node56 with Bearded Theory’s Bearded School management and supported a lot of the events, helping tirelessly keeping it all organised behind the scene. It’s amazing to make Danielle’s involvement more official.
node56 will be back to being a trio, each director with different backgrounds and skills to bring to the foreground of creative education, unique events and community projects. This is the current node team;
HEAD - Danielle Atterby BA (Hons) English & History, PGCE with QTS - Education
HEART - Andrea Fox MBE - Community
SOUL - Tom Stone BA (Hons) Multimedia Design - Creativity
Two thirds of us are living and working as teachers in China as we develop new exciting projects and some creative teaching resources under a new brand called EdVantage. We are opening a new office in Belper in the old Drop Inn JamJar music room which will act as our new community office (Project Phoenix). While we take some time out of hosting our own events some of our community event service facilities known as BelperLive will remain open for hire (please contact for enquiries). We have decided to organise our annual Bearded Theory stage which we have updated with a slight rebrand. The Rogues Hideout: Eastern Connection will be our first ever remote event organised from 7,000 miles away. We also plan to host some more original fundraising and networking events in the future. This year we are also be designing a brand new website which we hope to launch in 2020 to replace our terrible temporary one thats been stuck there for 7 years!
We are looking forward to sharing our fresh ideas with you all, reconnecting and celebrating more creativity, delivering valuable community work and developing new teaching resources. Who knows some of these projects might become international while two of us are in China. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ Please visit www.node56.com for more information but please excuse our temporary website, it’s being updated this year. Thank you.