Back in March and last week in June, I had the pleasure of volunteering my time with Croydon and Coulsdon Colleges.
In March, I gave a talk to the Croydon College IT students about ‘career pathways into engineering’ and strategies for success, focusing on emergent, dominant, and residual tooling, technologies, and job roles.
Then, from June 30th to July 4th, in collaboration with Coulsdon College, I organised a Hackathon for around 25 students from their A-level and BTEC courses. We saw five interesting applications, including a reimagining of ‘Spotify’, a ‘travel booking’ system, and three other proofs of concept (PoCs) related to pets and sports.
It was a great experience for the students who genuinely engaged, for the teaching team who provided invaluable support, and for me. I strongly believe in engaging young minds with a blend of competition and technical/creative challenges, fostering environments for both mentoring and reverse mentoring (where you can get fresh perspectives from those you teach).
A big thanks to the Heads, Teachers, Lecturers, and most importantly, the students who showed incredible determination, creativity, and teamwork!
Here are a few screenshots and a montage from the day – enjoy!
The students used a range of tech and tools in an AWS Cloud9 environment for pair programming, including PHP, Python, and JavaScript, along with AI prompts. 🚀
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