Announcing BASH Festival
Today we’re announcing BASH Festival — a free week-long coding festival for 13–17 year olds across the UK. It’s specifically aimed at young people who have had some exposure to development or digital design in the past.
How it’ll work
During the week young people will visit one of our (roughly) 15 regional hubs in cities across the UK. Supported by mentors, they’ll design and build projects around our challenges which we’ll announce the week before.
These regional hubs are volunteer run at universities, schools, offices, libraries and community spaces. We’ll provide training and a week breakdown so each hub is as awesome as possible.
On Saturday each hub will travel to Birmingham for our finale. They’ll show off their projects, attend loads of talks and workshops that we’ll organise, watch films, eat food and sleep over until the Sunday. Just before everyone heads off, we’ll showcase the most interesting projects and award some nice prizes.
It’s completely free, with the only cost being a packed lunch during the week and the travel to Birmingham (Hub Leaders will organise it so that participants can travel together).
Why is this important
There are many organisations out there who teach young people how to code and they’re fantastic. The challenge comes once they outgrow these programmes — how can we continue to support these engaged young people past the first step?
Lots of programmes which are for people who outgrow beginner material simply can’t facilitate under 18s for a number of reasons. We don’t expect a huge amount of existing knowledge, but out aim is to complement the amazing work done by organisations in teaching the initial skills.
We believe that BASH Festival is one part of the puzzle around supporting young technical people, and we’re already starting to think about how we can expand it and support the community more than once a year.
With BASH Festival we get to support fantastic regional communities of young people and mentors, as well as a national community that will meet up annually through the event.
Why do we care?
From our research, there doesn’t seem to be much like this at the moment.
Previously Young Rewired State served this audience of young developers and made some serious impact. I actually got my start in tech through their events and eventually worked with amazing folks like Julia, Nat and Kate in supporting young people through the organisation. After we moved on to do other things, YRS rightfully ran its course and no longer operates, and surprisingly nothing ever quite replaced it.
I’m personally invested in making this BASH happen as I benefited so much from its predecessor, as is the rest of the Underland team.
Want to help?
Fantastic. There are three ways which we’ll be needing help:
Run a regional hub.
We’ll have one hub in each of our chosen cities, but need people to apply to do it. Really all you need is a space, max 2 hours a week in the run-up and the week to facilitate the participants. You’ll also need to complete a new DBS check which we’ll organise. Apply here.
Be a mentor or a volunteer.
Each hub will need 3–4 mentors aged 18 or over to support the young people. You’ll also need to complete a DBS check for us. There’ll also be a range of ways to volunteer in the run-up and during the event. We’ll be posting all of these and inviting volunteers to pick items off of the list. Each will state their time commitment and some will require a DBS check which we’ll organise.
Support as a sponsor.
To make sure this is free for the participants, we need sponsorship (about 30k for a barebones event). Supporting BASH Festival is a great way to demonstrate your commitment to corporate social responsibility and there are lots of perks to make it worthwhile! You can find more information here.
Get updates
Registrations aren’t open yet, but if you’re interested in updates, you can register to get them via email on our website (https://bashfestival.io) or on our Twitter account (@underlandxyz). We’ll tweet about bash using #BASHFestival.
