Social enterprise AFBE-UK Scotland has launched an initiative to equip young people with the requisite coding skills to pursue their development possibilities in the digital era.

The organisation has introduced its NextGen Coding Club for young people aged from eight to 17 of all races, with special emphasis on children in the minority ethnic community.

AFBE-UK, which promotes diversity and inclusion and specifically encourages the pursuit of careers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, has already hosted its first club activities but a programme of events is scheduled for throughout 2021.

The next event is taking place during w/c March 29 and is themed Games and Animation with Scratch. People need to be pre-registered and potential participants can find out more by emailing nextgen@afbescotland.org

Club activities take place live online so that facilitators – including developers, programmers and software engineers – can provide one-to-one support for the young coders.

Programme lead Dr Urenna Adegbotolu said: “The beauty of the coding club is that the young people are co-creators of the course curriculum and they engage in educating each other, so they’re acquiring other life skills during each session.”

A recent survey of prospective club members showed a keen interest in games and animation, robotics and app creation in particular. It has helped to shape a club programme from which members should acquire five main skills:

• Responsive website creation with HTML and PHP
• Games and Animation with Scratch
• Robotics with Lego We Do 2.0, Lego Mindstorm and Raspberry Pi
• Artificial Intelligence with python
• Make your App with C/python and mobile app creation.

Aberdeen-based AFBE-UK Scotland runs mentoring programmes that offer all young people support with their STEM careers. This includes its schools programme NextGen, where industry leaders and professionals give advice to pupils through fun events; Transition, where industry leaders give advice to aspiring engineering professionals on how to enter the job market; and Real Projects, where industry professionals pass on their expertise. 

These programmes are usually face-to-face, but are meantime taking place online due to the pandemic. 

For more information visit AFBE-UK Scotland   l   KeyFacts Energy Industry Directory: AFBE UK