I’ve always pursued creativity through making stuff. Making stuff helps me to be happy and I believe it also helps children and young people. I remember putting a nail through two bits of wood to make a model sword, making boxes in woodwork class, splattering painting with acrylic and planting seeds and growing tomatoes. Later on in life, I started using computers, and much later on I discovered coding. Coding is, in essence, writing a list of tasks for a computer to perform. Computers perform some quite amazing tasks. It’s the same creative process that’s as old as time itself. Coding is a craft. Coding is for all!
Swansea MAD were funded by Meet and Code to offer coding workshops for children and young people during EU Code Week. The goal of Meet and Code is to introduce children and young people to technology and coding, how it works and how IT affects our daily lives. By exploring a broad range of technology, digital topics and creative coding, young people are encouraged to develop the skills they need for tomorrow’s competitive digital economy.
We love running coding sessions at Swansea MAD and recently we ran a Coding for Website Development workshop, funded by Meet and Code. Teaching the basics of HTML code; the very thing this webpage you are looking at is crafted from, the session aimed to give children and young people a basic understanding of HTML (Hypertext MarkUp Language) using basic HTML tags to craft a page and ending with the internet’s favorite animal – A CAT! The taster session aimed to give children and young people a basic understanding and to inspire them to develop their interest in coding.
Thank you to Meet and Code for funding coding workshops for children and young people at Swansea MAD and supporting us to widen access to coding and drive equity in technology. We believe that coding is for everyone. If you enjoy making stuff, just try it out. Watch a video, take a short course, have some fun building and crafting a programme.
Swansea MAD regularly delivers face-to-face and online coding workshops. Please contact us for more information: https://swanseamad.com/contact/
For resources on coding, visit: https://www.w3schools.com/ and https://www.khanacademy.org/
To find out more about Meet and Code, visit https://www.meet-and-code.org/gb/en/
Stuart Sumner – Smith