DigiLocal celebration 2017!

DigiLocal mentor discussing python code with an attendee at our 2017 Celebration event

On Saturday 1 July we welcomed young people from 8 DigiLocal local clubs across the West of England to share their visions of life in the year 2030!

We saw Scratch games for managing the ecology (and the importance of bees), through house delivery systems by helicopter, to health apps, and even a resource gathering game in python / Minecraft. A huge range of projects developed from original ideas the young people had, and taken through to functioning code over a period of roughly 6 months.

Tim Bowles learning about Bristol 2030 and the importance of bees from Redmaid’s girls.

The future is in this room and even though you may not yet know what you’ll be doing when you leave school, it’s hugely encouraging to see your enthusiasm for science and technology.

Tim Bowles, West of England Regional Mayor

We were honoured to host Tim Bowles (West of England Regional Mayor) to say a few words of encouragement opening the day. He was then completely drawn into the enthusiasm and competence demonstrated by the young people, spending the whole morning talking to each young person about their ideas and how they’d produced their final game.

Young coder gaining some pointers from a DigiLocal volunteer

DigiLocal is designed to support local communities run tech clubs for their young people. Each club meets once a week for about an hour. We’re currently supporting clubs every day of the week (with 2 on Tuesdays and Saturdays), representing around 100 kids every week having fun with tech and learning about building their own projects.

Clubs take place all over the West of England, and we’re working to start more where there is greatest need.

Contact John Bradford (john.bradford@digilocal.org.uk) for more information!

DigiLocal @ Stockwood Tech Takeover

DigiLocal young people learning how to control Minecraft via Python on a Raspberry Pi 3.

What to do in the half-term? Tech Takeover, of course!

We’ve been working with Nia at the Bristol Libraries Service for some time and were very happy to help support her Tech Takeover day at Stockwood Library on 16 Feb 2017.

Stockwood already runs a very successful CodeClub so I took some Raspberry Pi 3’s along. We soon had kids building games inside Minecraft using the Python API.

All the kids managed to get a working game running, a couple even completed the extra challenges at the end. The guides were all on the Raspberry Pi’s, I was just there to help trouble shoot syntax errors. Although coding is sometimes seen as a solitary activity, there was lots of social interaction with kids helping each other out; usually before I could get around the table to them myself, which is brilliant!

New tech ambassador helping his mum out with Minecraft & Python.

The focus for DigiLocal has always been supporting communities to run their own high quality tech clubs. The engagement from the young people was evident, one young lad stayed for over two hours and was asking for more Python projects (even ones that didn’t involve Minecraft)!

Stockwood Tech Takeover was unusual for us in that it was a single day. DigiLocal is normally a weekly activity in a community centre, library, or youth group. We work in partnership with other providers to provide the diverse communities across the region with regular, high quality, engagement with high tech.