It is the ultimate summer school for coders.
Young Rewired State
is a global community of self-taught young coders under the age of 18
who use their digital skills to "program the world around them". Every
summer YRS stages a Festival of Code. It is a sign of the progress
coding has made that when the festival was first held, in 2009, it took
its co-ordinator
Emma Mulqueeny
"three months to find 50 young coders in the whole of the UK". At this
year's festival, held recently, over 1,000 children took part at 61
centres across the country.
During the week the young programmers built apps, games, websites and
projects, some just for fun and others which met real-life needs and
challenges. The venues included the Raspberry Pi Foundation offices in
Cambridgeshire and the Compare the Market HQ in Peterborough. After
brainstorming ideas they worked on their projects. All that is asked of
the participants is that they use one piece of open data. Teams had
access to a mentor who could offer advice and support, but otherwise the
teams worked independently. At the end of the week the teams presented
their final projects in front of a panel of judges in a huge 'show and
tell' event at the University of Plymouth.
Awards were given for
best designs and best use of code, along with unique categories in the
spirit of YRS such as "Code a Better Country" and "Should Exist". Among
the most popular projects were "YouDraw", a crowd-sourced video
animation platform giving the opportunity to create user-generated
animated music videos; "Tourify", an app supplying unique customised
tours for travellers; and "Miles Per Pound", a website which calculates
the cost efficiency of your car. Other more idiosyncratic innovations
included an app that measures proximity to danger, a bitcoin exchange
rate service and a coat rack weather forecasting device.
Children as young as 8 made presentations that as one adult tech start-up founder commented,
"could rival those of people 3 or 4 times their age".
However, it is not so much the winning that matters in Young Rewired
State as the coding: perhaps the definitive image of the event is that
of hundreds of kids at their laptops, not playing games or wasting time
on the web but creating new games and new websites. The final gathering
is a chance to have fun, meet other members of the community and learn
from each other. These are the people born after 1997 who, in
Mulqueeny's view, are the 'digital natives': children who have grown up
around the web and who through 'peer to peer learning' have the skills
to shape society and education.
"Digital skills in education has been a hot topic for the past few
years", says Mulqueeny. "Young Rewired State, the organisation behind
the Festival of Code,
was a champion of that effort - but the festival is much more about this
community of young people." The Plymouth gathering also included 40
youngsters from overseas as well as a YRS group from Kosovo who
presented remotely.
It may make some feel rather old and unskilled by comparison; but it
should also leave us inspired and confident about the future innovators,
engineers and entrepreneurs amongst us.
https://youngrewiredstate.org/