Coding against homelessness with Crisis
Homelessness is a huge problem in society. There are people doing great work to combat homelessness and help those at risk (e.g. our friends at Street Support), but still there has been a dramatic rise over recent years.
Crisis is a national charity in the UK which is dedicated to ending homelessness. As well as other great work, they deliver classes that help people learn new skills which gives them confidence and improves their chances of finding employment.
At the School of Code we constantly hear how desperate companies are to find tech talent — there is a massive skills shortage. I wanted to see if we could teach some of the people Crisis support the basics of web development from scratch. I contacted Peter Homer, who works for Crisis, and within a week we quickly organised a pilot course of 6 short lessons and advertised it to Crisis members — 12 turned up to our first lesson.
For 2 hours a week over the next 6 weeks we taught them how to make a website completely from scratch — the basics of the internet, servers, HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript thrown in for good measure. We used our collaborative coding platform to pair them up so that they could support and motivate each other when they were learning. The people we were teaching have a lot to deal with — it was hard for the students to work outside of class, so a lot of the time was spent recalling the previous lesson, and attendance fluctuated.
After the 6 lessons, the feedback we had was great! People felt more comfortable with tech in general, could design and code a basic page, and understood the underlying technology without having to rely on drag and drop interfaces. We sped through the curriculum, but the students enjoyed themselves and learned to code.
We were really encouraged by the short pilot, and had worked out what we could do better next time — we will be looking to run a full course in 2017. We are taking what we have learnt from our Crisis classes and collaborating with Hack Your Future to teach refugees to code in London. If you want to help through mentoring, it is entirely flexible in terms of in-person or remote and how much time you can dedicate. For more info please get in touch by emailing hello@schoolofcode.co.uk.
Coding presents an opportunity for real social change — there is a need for talent, so we need to give everyone an equal chance of learning tech skills and benefiting from the tech industry.
We are launching our Kickstarter campaign on the 20th October 2016 to bring our multiplayer coding platform to the world and carry on giving everyone the chance to learn to code. To back us, or find out more, sign up to our newsletter or visit our campaign by clicking here.
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