Digital skills are increasingly important in education and work and so it’s important that young people are well-prepared to make the most of them.

We work with many different young people, from different backgrounds, with different interests and needs. We generally start at age 8 (year 4) but we don’t have an upper age limit.

We run after-school and Saturday sessions for different age groups either at our well-equipped HQ or at other sites such as libraries.

For younger children we usually offer a self-guided activity supported by our staff and volunteers.  All these activities encourage attendees to experiment with tools to add their own personal touches to a project.

For older students, we typically invite them to work on something that interests them, with our help and support.  Sometimes that means starting with a pre-designed activity script – other times it might be learning from books & magazines, or tutorials on the internet, or just seeing what works.

Very many of the young people with whom we work have some aspect of neurotypical traits (eg autism, ADHD, dyslexia, etc) and although we’re not specialists in the field we have a lot of experience of how this can make some activities a challenge and our team are often able to help with support strategies.  In fact, about 50% of our staff and volunteers have some form of neurodiversity and we love the creativity of thinking that this brings to our team.

Outside of our extra-curricular work, we’re also happy to design sessions which support students in specific skills such as use of the tools frequently used in classrooms and workplaces and basic online safety.  We also encourage everyone to think of fun digital skills such as robotics and 3D printing as equally valuable because they often provide motivation to learn skills which are readily translatable to other, more mainstream, digital tools.

We have long list of equipment and tools that we use – here are just a few:
3D printers, Raspberry Pi computers, animation cameras and software, high quality digital cameras and editing software, electronic microcontroller and circuits, Lego Robots, Coding software such as Scratch and Python.  We also have a range of laptop and desktop computers we use.

Our preference is always to have open and mixed groups of young people, but we know sometimes that narrowing the criteria for a cohort can often encourage young people who might struggle in a mixed group to thrive.  As a result, we have happily run workshops for prescribed groups upon request.