Young Coders Conference
Young Coders Conference
On Monday I took part in the Young Coders Conference. It was hosted at Tate Exchange (Blavatnik Building, Tate Modern) over two days, Mon 12th & Tue 13th Feb, with the South London Raspberry Jam team . Its aim was to prepare 12 selected young coders, me included, to collaborate, create & then deliver awesome workshops to the public using Micro:bits & Pi Tops.
Day one was all about getting to know each other & getting fuelled up with knowledge from a line up of guest speakers. This included industry experts from the Micro:bit Foundation, GitHub, Computers at School (CAS), Pi-Top, IBM and Google. They created quite a buzz with their cool challenges & activities – whilst teaching us about new developments in coding and digital making.
A little later on we were put into teams of 3 & linked up with a mentor. In our teams we brainstormed workshop ideas for the following themes: IoT (the internet of things); wearables; robotics & physical computing; gaming and networking.
The brainstorm sessions gave us a tonne of ideas which we eventually narrowed down to 4 (one for each area).
With guidance & encouragement from our mentors & the industry guest, we discussed & planned the workshops; made worksheets that were inspired by stuff that we’d learnt from the earlier sessions & sorted out the layout. I was really impressed with the amount of people from the Micro:bit Foundation that were on hand. They rounded off day one by awarding all the young coders with a set of micro:bits for us to use in future community workshops beyond the conference. To top it off, Pi Top gave us all a Pi Top T-shirt so we would look like a team.
On the second day we finished off our resources & organised the equipment and workstations – ready for the start. I was so amazed when the public rushed through the doors & the workshop places began to fill up.
It felt great introducing the workshops & helping the participants work their way through the challenges. There was a mixture of people, some who had a bit experience with the Microbit / Pi top & those with none. At one point some adults joined our workshop, it was fun running them through the challenges.
Luckily, for the crowd of visitors, there was a chill out zone and an artist area to keep them busy while they waited for a workshop slot. In the artist area you got a chance to use an Augmented Reality app with the actual app designer, to help make a mural. The app is called Visualizar and it allows you to draw pictures from your android device. The chillout zone gave people a chance to sit down & create a cool piece of artwork which used working electronic components & circuits.
It was a fantastic two days and great opportunity for everybody. I’m really looking forward to future Young Coders Conferences & using the training for future workshops in the community.
You can find out more about the Young Coders Conference here: Young Coders Conference
