This year I'm Centre Lead for Edinburgh (Prewired) YRS Centre. Kids hack all week, and we (Scottish Centres teaming up) take a coach to Birmingham on Friday for the Festival of Code at the weekend.
This year I'm Centre Lead for Edinburgh (Prewired) YRS Centre. Kids hack all week, and we (Scottish Centres teaming up) take a coach to Birmingham on Friday for the Festival of Code at the weekend.
Heading up this year's Edinburgh YRS contingent. Want to mentor? Sign up! Hoping to raise enough money to take two dozen kids to Birmingham on a coach, seeking sponsors...
Heading up this year's Edinburgh YRS contingent. Want to mentor? Sign up! Hoping to raise enough money to take two dozen kids to Birmingham on a coach, seeking sponsors...
Helped to organise the local centre, recruited participants in the run up; we got teams through to the semi-finals this time! The Festival of Code was in Plymouth this year, so most of our participants couldn't make the trip; organised a mini-alternative with Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen centres, in Dundee instead.
Our third Prewired event went smoothly, with 20 young people (about 4 new) and 7 or so parents attending, plus 8 mentors. So lower signups than usual (a few cancellations due to school commitments), but we decided not to do a big publicity push and see how it ran with a smaller group. I didn't notice much difference, since they organise themselves into smaller groups anyway to work on different things. I think next time we'll try to reach our capacity of 40.
We had a big group working on a variety of Python projects (games, basics, algorithms, I'm not sure what else..), a small group doing front-end web, and quite a few doing amazing things with Scratch.
Every week I discover new things these super-talented young people are doing with their time, and it won't be long before many of them are spending a lot of time mentoring their peers as well as working on their own projects.
Nantas came by to talk about what he does with the University's Robotics lab, including the challenges of making humanoid robots play football, and the state of the art, two-million-pounds, full sized humanoid robot that is moving to Edinburgh in the near future. Definitely stuff to get young people excited about learning to code.
We've been trying to encourage them to code between Prewired sessions, too, and about half of them said they had. I hope by the next time all of them have, and I'm really excited to see what they're capable of making in a few months time!
But...
Some of the young people attending are disadvantaged by not being able to bring their own laptop, or having only really old laptops which can't support modern browsers and therefore have trouble even executing the JavaScript their writing (true story).
We'd love to be able to pay for a set of simple but up-to-date laptops that we could lend to the attendees who don't have their own during sessions. This at least will put them on a level playing field with the others during the sessions, and I suspect that many of them have adequate desktop machines or family laptops at home.
Prewired runs on a budget of volunteer blood, sweat and tears, and zero pounds. We're lucky enough to be able to use space in the University Informatics building for free, and there are no shortage of keen mentors and helpers willing to chip in their time (and in some cases cash for snacks).
So if you work for a company who might be able to support the purchase of resources for our young coders, or know someone who does, then please get in touch!
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Several weeks of debating and planning following Young Rewired State finally came to fruition on the 16th of October, with our first Prewired event.
Thirty eight kidsyoung people arrived between 9:30 and 10 on that
Wednesday morning (it was half term week in Scotland, so we weren't pulling
them out of school), grabbed some kindly donated Google swag, made name badges
with stickers and felt-tipped pens, and sat down for two and a half hours of
lightly guided learning.
They were between the ages of three and eighteen, although the three to six year olds were more there to be tagging along with older siblings or University staff. It's obviously impossible to divide attendees up by age and decide what to work with them on, as older definitely does not mean more experienced. We had decided on no lower bound for the age limit, and no lower bound for experience either, figuring that the only real requirement is enthusiasm about programming. There was a huge mix of interests and abilities, and we let them decide for themselves which topics would be worth listening to.
We also had about fifteen students, University staff or industry professionals along as mentors.
After a few minutes of welcomes, where most of the room were willing to introduce themselves and tell us what they wanted to learn ("Python", "Scratch" and "more about programming in general" were popular ones) we kicked off with three five minute introductions: to HTML and CSS (beginner), to HTML5 Geolocation (intermediate) and to Python's Natural Language Toolkit (advanced). They then had the chance to spend 40 minutes in a hands-on session for whichever of these they chose. The groups were very evenly spread, and despite a few hiccups with Python installations on Windows and Chrome not playing nice with geolocation (worked through thanks largely to the mentors) most people got some code up and running and appropriately hacked about with by the end.
We took a break for juice, crisps, chocolate and fruit, plus a bit of hardware tinkering. We'd borrowed a Nodecopter, but hadn't managed to get it charged in time so it wasn't in the air, but there were still plenty of people interested in looking at the code to control it. We also had a demo of a robot arm, which could be controlled by an Android app connected to a Python server, which had been written over the summer by one of our mentors.
Next up were three more lightning talks: introduction to Scratch (beginner), doing cool things with Redstone Circuits in Minecraft (intermediate) and introduction to PyGame (intermediate-advanced). The following hands-on session for Scratch was under-attended, possibly ousted by the allure of Minecraft, but the PyGame session had over a third of the group and made some great progress, which was awesome.
We finished a little late, but still managed to have time for a quick demo of a football playing robot from the nearby robotics lab, and a few attendees who took their time dragging themselves away from their screens.
I'm told that overall it was a success. I was concerned because I was
generally called upon when something was going wrong, so my perspectively was
weighted towards the negative. But it wasn't too chaotic, none of the
kidsattendees played up, and as far as we could tell they were
doing something in some way productive at all times.
A lot of them had had little to no programming experience before that morning, and I really hope they were able to take away something positive and, most importantly, feel encouraged to try things out by themselves at home. Plenty, too, had enough experience that they were calling out to correct the speakers, and helping their peers to get things working. It's a huge challenge to find enough activities to engage so many different levels of experience and interest, and I don't think we did a bad job.
Our next Prewired event will be on the 30th of October, and we're running them bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings from now on. They will be henceforth less structured. Our primary aim is to help young people to realise that with programming (and related areas) they can create anything, express themselves, and change the world. We don't wish to enforce a curriculum, but encourage them to explore areas they are interested in, learn how to teach themselves and figure out how to make what they want, and most of all to persuade them not to be afraid to experiment - to hack - and to just keep trying if it doesn't work first time. To get them excited before they become jaded and before this society's stereotypes have a chance to impact on them.
You can find out more about Prewired at prewired.org, and join the mailing list there too.
Here are some of the photos from the day:
If you took some that you'd like us to add, then please send them to hello@prewired.org!
Similarly, send any feedback you have about the event to us that way, as well.
I'll update this post (as well as the website) with resources from the speakers and mentors as I get hold of them.
Beginning HTML and CSS:
HTML5 Geolocation:
Building a chatbot with Python's Natural Language Toolkit:
Intro to Scratch:
Minecraft Redstone Circuits:
Intro to PyGame:
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Young Rewired State is a week-long hack event for under 19s. There are centres all over the UK, and the week finishes with a giant sleepover in the Custard Factory in Birmingham, presentations and prizes.
I was helping out with running the Edinburgh centre this year, between the 5th and 11th of August. We had 15 young people taking part, and a few parents popping in and out as well. Not to mention several fantastic mentors.
Every day we gathered in one of the University of Edinburgh Informatics computer labs. On the first day we did some brainstorming, introduced the young people to Open Data, and they sorted themselves into teams.
We had a diverse range of projects by the end of the week.
The Weatherproof app was written in Scala with a Web frontend, and as well as telling you the weather forecast, gives you practical advice on what to wear and what to take with you.
_Stuff Index _was a Python Web app that lets people photograph and upload stuff they've left out on the street that they want to get rid of, so anyone browsing the site can opt to take it away if they fancy it. Helping to keep stuff out of landfill, and without the dreaded social interactions that come with Freegle.
Tag is a game by a one-man team, with a Python game server and a JavaScript front end that lets you chase your friends around the real world, and automatically tags them when you're in range.
_PokeGame _is a real-world Pokemon simulator that lets you roam IRL and capture virtual Pokemon.
Great stuff!
On Friday we crammed into a coach along with the participants from Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow, and set off on a seven hour road trip to Birmingham for the finale.
The Edinburgh teams didn't win anything, but the presentations were fantastic and everyone had an amazing time. The young people made new friends, learnt tons of new stuff, and hopefully remain enthused about coding.
Next year we're going to do more to walk through the creation process of some example apps to get them started off, and maybe do a better job of introducing Open Data and the possibilities it holds.
We're also thinking about starting a regular under 19s code club in Edinburgh
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Helped to organise the local centre, recruited participants in the run up, and helped with mentoring during the week. Also helped to supervise a coachload of kids for the trip to the Festival of Code.
Helped under 19s prepare projects to present to judges at the Festival of Code.