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!
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.