How kids and parents had fun coding together
We’ve teamed up with the BBC this summer to bring coding to everyone! We launched the Summer of Code on Saturday 23rd July 2016 at BBC Birmingham in the Mailbox — it was a great day!
People of all ages, experience, and abilities joined in and tried out our “Character Building” challenge, which teaches you to code through making your very own pixel character. But the interesting part came because, on our School of Code platform, you can join up and code in teams.
Friends, family, and people who’d never met before all joined up and helped each other explore coding in a fun and social way. We had some great feedback from parents and their children who had teamed up together.
“Usually, I have no clue about technology or coding. My son loves it though, so I find it hard to keep up and support him. With the Character Building app, we could play through the challenge together, and it was fun for both of us — I think that really helped us both learn a lot!” — Parent from BBC Summer of Code event
The collaborative coding platform helps people support and motivate each other, but also helps kids and parents both have fun and learn to code together.
Our next session with the BBC is Saturday 20th August 2016 from 1–4pm at BBC Birmingham in the Mailbox. We will be doing more Character Building, and even more cool activities. Book your child’s place now by emailing us at summer@schoolofcode.co.uk
The School of Code is an online platform that teaches people code, but in a fun and social way. Drop into a team and learn to code together — find out how by visiting www.schoolofcode.co.uk
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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