Rebel Makers Camp is tomorrow! Here’s what’s happening!
One. More. Sleep. *jumps in the air and fist pumps*
We’ve been fortunate enough to have a set of phenomenal people offer to run sessions to excite and inspire attendees around a number of areas in tech and digital.
They’ll be a mix of talks, tutorials, workshops and discussions from subjects such as learning Ruby of Rails, to understanding how hardware works, to a discussion on how to empower your local communities.
It’s a varied schedule that will hopefully inspire attendees to continue exploring new topics in the Club and after the event. Here’s a rundown on what you can expect…
Drop-in sessions
Throughout the day, we encourage everyone to work on their own projects — learning from, and sharing skills with, others. As a team, we are able to support you in a number of areas — including web development, media production and playing with electronics. We encourage you to look beyond these topics though, ask for support on anything you’re interested in.
We’ve also been incredibly fortunate to have The School of Code offer to come along and run their HTML & CSS workshop in the morning. You will learn how to build a piece of art — an avatar — using code, and it’s going to be great. Don’t worry if you have never done it before, this is a low-pressure environment to learn loads.
Using electronics is something which many people can find quite scary at the beginning — we definitely found it daunting. In this talk you’ll get an introduction to hardware so you understand the basics regardless of what specific piece of tech you’re using. Alex will be around all day to support you after his session — so feel free to ask them questions.
Alex Bucknall is a Developer Evangelist at Sigfox, an organisation that built a global network for the Internet of Things. He’s also the founder of Warwick Tech, a student-run tech society at Warwick University, and a Coach at Major League Hacking who are the official student hackathon league.
Smartphones may be small, but they’re incredibly powerful devices just waiting to be unleashed. This workshop will provide the essential guide for making the very most of your smartphones. With Kate, you will explore the best apps to improve your productivity, creativity and social media skills in a fun and interactive way.
Kate McDonald is a co-founder of Rebel Labs — that’s us! We’ve had lots of experience in enabling people of all ages to make the most of our technology, running multiple programmes before co-founding the company. She’s also a fantastic copywriter, and a Scot-turned-Roman.
We often think of multiple ways to communicate with people, many of which can be done on multiple devices — whether that’s email, a Facebook message, or a tweet. What many don’t know, though, is that you can send/receive calls and texts from any device when talking the language of phones. Twilio allows developers to send and receive these messages with code. This is a workshop to get you started!
Marcos Placona is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio. He supports hundreds of people every year, and enables them to build amazing projects. As well as his knowledge of Twilio, he’s also an awesome Android developer — so hit him up during the event if you need a hand.
MaxMSP is an environment for programming with sound — something not many people have had a chance to play with before. This beginner workshop will introduce you to the software, how it works, and empower you to continue playing with it throughout the day with support from Amy.
Amy Dickens is a Researcher at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham. She is also the lead organiser for Inspire WiT — an annual women in tech conference which takes place at the university.
Ruby is a powerful, general purpose programming language with lots of uses. Rails sits on top of it as a framework, and harnesses it’s power to build some more complex web functionality that just HTML & CSS on it’s own would not be able to, such as storing and retrieving data. In this workshop, Alicia will use the amazing RailsGirls resources to give you a primer and help you get started with the language and framework.
Alicia Beylan is Vice President of KCLTech — King’s College London’s tech society, who organise multiple large-scale events every year. She is also Student Ambassador for HackCampus, who connect students to great interning opportunities in London.
React.js is one of the hottest pieces of tech this year. It’s a JavaScript framework which has developers completely rethink the way they build and maintain their client-side code (the parts of a website a user sees and interacts with). In this slightly more intermediate tutorial, Alex will show you the core concepts of the framework and support you in getting started.
Alex Wiley is a web developer and designer based in Birmingham. He has previously interned at School of Code, who very much share our ethos of supporting everyone learn to code. He attends loads of hackathons and builds lots of fun and experimental projects.
For those of you who don’t know, Minecraft is a game on various platforms which let’s players build structures with different kinds of blocks. There is one block in the game which can be used to construct circuits. In this session, Pandelis will show you how to build circuits inside of the game, teaching you skills which are applicable to real-world electronics as well.
Pandelis Zembashis is a Birmingham-based web developer who also runs the hackathon circuit — attending dozens of events every year and using them to learn, build and share. He’s part of the Hackathon and Computing Society at Birmingham City University and is a super approachable, awesome person.
We hear the term ‘Smart’ thrown around a lot when related to tech, with many definitions of what this means. Mike lives and breathes ‘smart tech’ while running their company — Vanti — who, among other things, work on installing smart buildings. In this session, Mike will talk about their work and allow you to ask questions (so go ahead, grill them).
Mike Brooman is CEO of Vanti, an award-winning creator of digital experiences for people who work and learn in smart and intelligent systems. He’s also a long time supporter of the Rebel Makers project and is super excited to share their knowledge with you.
Git is a version control system that allows people to back up versions of their work, experiment with new ideas, and collaborate with others. Along with GitHub, they’re a toolset which can improve your workflow — whether you are a technical person or not. Josh will run you through exactly what it is, how it works and help you set started.
Joshua Simpson is an Associate at ANDigital — who build digital products and teams for their clients. He’s also a serial hackathon organiser — leading the teams for both HackKing’s to date, and the latest HackLondon — a collaborative effort between KCL and UCL.
We are big believers that everyone should have the ability to explore technology, regardless of their age, background, or gender. We run Rebel Makers Camp as a showcase and celebration of this, and also run Rebel Makers Clubs — smaller monthly meetups around the country. Both in the context of this project and beyond, Kevin will lead a discussion on taking your passion and using it to empower your local communities.
Kevin Lewis is co-founder of Rebel Labs, leading the Rebel Makers project with Kate. He is also a front-end web developer, government data nerd and lover of board games.
This is going to be great
We are so excited to welcome you all to Rebel Makers Camp 2016. Follow #RMCamp16 throughout the day, and we can’t wait to see what you learn.
See you tomorrow, and much love,
Kate, Nat, Julia, TJ, Johl and Kevin
Team Rebel Labs ❤
