It was about five and a half hours journey by coach to London, I pottered about for a bit and then went to find MS office, only to find they weren't expecting me. So a few frantic phone calls and I finally got waved through, we didn't really get to see much of the building and went straight into interviews but I did find out they have a Showcase Classroom where teachers can bring their students to play with all the cool MS tech so I definitely want to do that. The interviewers were lovely and it was really easy, just questions to get an idea of leadership and teaching ability and gauge passion of the subject. So naturally I passed and have been awarded the scholarship. What. This is genuinely freaking me out, I've been told I'm clever and "good with computers" all my life with no real direction to that energy and knowledge. But in the past few months I've been told I'm a good teacher so many times it's absolutely thrown me for a loop, and this is now like... an official "We think you'll be a good teacher, have some money and tell everyone else how to teach" scholarship that I have no frame of reference for how awesome it is. I was gobsmacked to have been accepted back in to the schools for my experience program, to get onto a teacher training course was amazing, to get a scholarship for this is just... I don't even have a word and none of the synonyms provided by Google seem weighty enough. It's mindflogging spragtastic!
The British Computing Society Teaching Scholarship, it gives me more resources to be a computer science teacher and I will work with industry so that I can keep things up to date and relevant etc. I'm really excited about it and have seen quite a few positive experiences come out of it.