This week 20 young people from accross Cornwall set out on a Mission to Mars, delivered by Software Cornwall, Cornwall College and a host of volunteers all 5 teams achieved mission success and presented their code skills to the guests and other teams.
The workshop was delivered by Mike Trebilcock with volunteers to help bring visibility and awareness to coding careers available in the county. It is hoped that many of the 15-25 year olds attending will now consider further education in computing to secure themselves a successful future career in the county. The workshop is a 4 day experience that enables students to work as teams to learn how to code and build a product as a start up business team. The course aims to inspire those attending into software careers as well as providing them with key skills in team work and communications.
The majority of students attending had little knowledge of coding, with others having studied some at school or self taught. Each team was given a mission to code a robot to navigate, sense and identify objects.
The 4 day workshop was funded and supported by Software Cornwall Members, Cornwall College, Microtest & Agile on the Beach, together with volunteer mentors Byran from Bluefruit, Pete from Mymedialab, local Peter Davies, Shannon Issac a final year student at Plymouth University and Steve Amor who also build the robots Bert & Ernie that the teams had to code. The event was kindly hosted by Real Ideas Organisation in Liskeard.
The workshop attracted BBC spotlight who covered the mission on both the lunchtime and evening news on Tuesday. Eddy Search from Goonhilly, and Phil Seeva Mayor of Liskeard joined the teams along with parents and sponsors on the final day to see the teams demonstrate their results.
Software Cornwall hope to secure further sponsorship and support to run future missions in the county. If you would like to support a mission please email [email protected]
More photos and videos of the workshop and presentations are available on the Software Cornwall facebook page