Supporting a local coding club for young people
For the past few months, a handful of Arcwell engineers have been spending Thursday evenings at a coding club for young people not far from our office in Manchester. It is a small commitment, but it is one we have come to look forward to each week.
The club runs sessions for eleven- to sixteen-year-olds who want to learn to build things with code. Some arrive already tinkering with games and websites at home; others have never written a line and just want to see what it is about. Our role is simply to be helpful adults in the room: answering questions, debugging the inevitable typos, and showing that the people who do this for a living were once exactly where they are.
Why we think it matters
We remember what it was like to be curious about computers without quite knowing where to start, or whether this was a thing for people like us. A patient person willing to sit alongside you and say "let's figure out why that isn't working" can make an enormous difference. We cannot be that for everyone, but we can be it for a small group on a Thursday evening, and that feels worthwhile.
Alongside the volunteering, we have donated a batch of refurbished laptops that had reached the end of their life in our office but have plenty left to give a beginner. They have been wiped, set up with the tools the club uses, and put back to work.
A standing invitation
We are not making a grand programme of this, and we are wary of the kind of corporate volunteering that exists mainly for the photographs. This is just something a few of us enjoy doing. If it grows naturally, we will be glad; if it stays a quiet weekly habit, that is fine too. Either way, the young people at the club ask far better questions than most of us expected, and we usually leave having learned something ourselves.
Published by the Arcwell Systems team. Have a question about anything in this article? Get in touch — we're happy to talk.