Discover Computing workshop for Supplementary Schools

The 'Discover Computing' event ran over two Saturdays (11th and 18th in May) for students primarily from the supplementary schools in North Kensington. The aim of the workshop was to provide students (and family) from under-represented minorities an insight into Computing to pique their interest in pursuing it for their studies. It would also help immensely raise their economic prospects given the fact that Computing careers are one of the highest-paid careers after university.

The target audience for this planned activity were students and parents from the supplementary schools in the North Kensington area. The workshop was planned with the help of the Westway trust, primarily Muna Ali, who is the Programme Coordinator (supplementary schools) and Val Patterson, who is the Head of Learning and Skills and the Associate Director of Education
and Services.

On each day we had a morning and an afternoon session running around two and a half hours. The event was very well attended with almost a full house in terms of the numbers - we had aimed for 15 total adult-child pairs and we had 14 in a couple of sessions and 16-17 in others.

The feedback was very good overall and the word of mouth strong, so much so that they now want us to run a couple more during the next academic year. The main area of improvement is that they wanted more activities, so we will try and see what to add without making it too crowded.  98.1% found the event to be enjoyable, 98.1% said they would recommend this event to others, 78.4% said that their awareness of Computing education/career pathways had changed and 76% said that their knowledge about computing and/or university had changed.