Tag Archives: digital skills

Learning from our hybrid training programme for youth and community organisations

Post Syndicated from Mirnali Koneswaran original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/learning-from-our-hybrid-training-programme-for-youth-and-community-organisations/

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we aim to democratise access to digital skills and technologies. One of the ways we do this is via partnerships with youth and community organisations that deliver frontline services to young people experiencing educational disadvantage.

Two smiling adults at a computer.

In 2023 we delivered a hybrid training programme to 14 youth organisations in the UK to help youth leaders and educators incorporate coding and digital making activities into their provision to young people. The training programme was supported by Amazon Future Engineer. In this blog, we summarise what we’ve learned from our evaluation of the training and its impact.

Youth workers feel prepared to run digital making activities

In total, 29 youth leaders and educators participated in the training, which consisted of 12 modules delivered across 4 online sessions and one in-person day. We asked participants to complete surveys at several points throughout the programme to enable us to explore their feedback, the training’s impact on their confidence in facilitating computing sessions, and their experiences of running activities with young people.

The educators on this programme were already well motivated to run digital making sessions. But one of the main challenges youth organisations report to us most often is that their staff and volunteers need more confidence in their ability to deliver coding activities on an ongoing basis. It was therefore great to see that, following the training, every participant felt at least moderately prepared to run coding activities, with 2 out of every 5 participants feeling very prepared. Furthermore, we recorded positive impact of the training on participants’ readiness: after the training, 4 out of every 5 participants agreed they had the skills they needed to facilitate activities for young people.

“It was pitched right for the majority of attendees with no knowledge of Scratch[.]” – Karl Nicholson, Manchester Youth Zone

The training was well received

Educators found the training to be high quality and, in almost all cases, beneficial. Participants reported that attending two online sessions in preparation for the in-person training day had improved their experience of the in-person activites.

“It was really great. The online courses are excellent and being in-person to get answers to questions really helped. The tinkering was really useful and having people on hand to answer questions [was] massively helpful.” – Liam Garnett, Leeds Libraries

Some participants told us they struggled with the second online training session. This may be because it contained more challenging content: moving from block-based coding (Scratch) to text-based coding (Python), a transition we know many people new to programming can find difficult.

This feedback has helped inform the next iteration of our training programme for youth and community organisations.

A Learning Manager is supporting two adult educators during a training session.

Youth workers are now running digital making sessions

Since the training, attendees across the 14 organisations have reported that, so far, 39 digital making sessions have taken place, reaching 422 young people. Youth leaders and educators who have already run sessions also told us they intend to continue with coding and digital making activities with their young people in the future.

Young learners in a coding club.

Among these youth leaders was Marie Henry, founder of Breadline London, a grassroots charitable organisation based in Haringey, London, that supports families and young people to break the cycle of poverty through financial education, training, and practical workshops.

Since the training programme, Marie has gone on to start a regular coding club in her local area.

“We are immensely grateful to the Raspberry Pi Foundation team for their encouragement and unwavering support in empowering us to launch our own coding club. Their guidance, expertise, hands-on training workshops, and provision of essential equipment and devices have been instrumental in our journey towards building a positive community for our young coders.

With their help, we’ve gained the confidence, knowledge, and skills needed to inspire the next generation of coders and innovators. We still have a lot to learn, but with them by our side, we are confident that our coding club will be a great success.

Thank you, Raspberry Pi Foundation, for believing in our vision and helping us turn it into reality.” – Marie Henry, Founder of Breadline London

Some of the organisations that participated in the training have not yet run sessions, but plan to start delivery within the next 1 to 3 months. They continue to face some logistical challenges, ranging from staff shortages and volunteer availability, to encouraging local young people with limited prior exposure to computing to join the digital making activities. We are continuing to support these organisations to get up and running as soon as possible.

“Oh my what a great coding after school session I’ve had this afternoon…Scratch not only sets a starting point for children in their ITC learning, but is also a fun way to learn and build on skills they can take with them as they grow.

Planting the seeds of aspirations!” – Heather Coultard, Doncaster Children’s University

Our ongoing support to youth and community organisations

Our previous blog highlighted the importance of increasing young people’s sense of belonging within a coding club environment, to appeal to marginalised youth. Our findings suggest we are on the right track. Overall, participants felt positive about the training and found it to be of high quality, and it has helped them to deliver digital making sessions to young people in their communities. The organisations’ detailed feedback and impact reporting will continue to inform and improve the development of our training programmes going forward.

We thank Amazon Future Engineer for helping us run this rewarding programme. 

For more information about how we can support youth and community organisations in the UK in starting their coding clubs, please send us a message on the subject ‘Partnerships’.

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Working with UK youth and community organisations to tackle the digital divide

Post Syndicated from Tom Hadfield original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/working-with-uk-youth-community-organisations-to-tackle-digital-divide/

At the heart of our work as a charity is the aim to democratise access to digital skills and technologies. Since 2020, we have partnered with over 100 youth and community organisations in the UK to develop programmes that increase opportunities for young people experiencing educational disadvantage to engage and create with digital technology in underserved communities.

Youth organisations attempting to start a coding club can face a range of practical and logistical challenges, from a lack of space, to funding restrictions, and staff shortages. However, the three issues that we hear about most often are a lack of access to hardware, lack of technical expertise among staff, and low confidence to deliver activities on an ongoing basis.

In 2023, we worked to help youth organisations overcome these barriers by designing and delivering a new hybrid training programme, supported by Amazon Future Engineer. With the programme, we aimed to help youth leaders and educators successfully incorporate coding and digital making activities as part of their provision to young people.

“Really useful, I have never used Scratch so going [through] the project made it clear to understand and how I would facilitate this for the children[.]” – Heather Coulthard, Doncaster Children’s University

Participating organisations

We invited 14 organisations from across the UK to participate in the training, based on:

  • The range of frontline services they already provide to young people in underresourced areas (everything from employability skills workshops to literacy classes, food banks, and knife crime awareness schemes)
  • Previous participation in Raspberry Pi Foundation programmes
  • Their commitment to upskill their staff and volunteers and to run sessions with young people on a regular basis following the training

Attendees included a number of previous Learn at Home partners, including Breadline London, Manchester Youth Zone, and Youth Action. They all told us that the additional support they had received from the Foundation and organisations such as The Bloomfield Trust during the coronavirus pandemic had directly inspired them to participate in the training and begin their own coding clubs. 

Online sessions to increase skills and confidence

We started with four online training sessions where we introduced the youth leaders to digital making concepts, programming languages, and recommended activities to run with their young people. This included everything from making their own block-based Scratch games, to running Python programs on our Code Editor and trying out physical computing via our new micro:bit project path.

Alongside digital skills and interactive codealongs, the training also focused on how to be an effective CoderDojo mentor, including classroom management best practice, an explanation of the thinking behind our 3…2…1…Make! project paths, and an overview of culturally relevant pedagogy.

This last part explored how youth leaders can adapt and tailor digital making resources designed for a wide, general audience for their specific groups of young people to aid their understanding, boost their learning outcomes, and increase their sense of belonging within a coding club environment — a common blocker for organisations trying to appeal to marginalised youth.

In-person training to excite and inspire

The training culminated in a day-long, in-person session at our head office in Cambridge, so that youth leaders and educators from each organisation could get hands-on experience. They experimented with physical computing components such as the Raspberry Pi Pico, trained their own artificial intelligence (AI) models using our Experience AI resources, and learned more about how their young people can get involved with Coolest Projects and Astro Pi Mission Zero.

The in-person session also gave everyone the chance to get excited about running digital making activities at their centres: the youth leaders got to ask our team questions, and had the invaluable opportunity to meet each other, share their stories, swap advice, and discuss the challenges they face with their peers.

“Having the in-person immensely improved my skills and knowledge. The instructors were all brilliant and very passionate.” – Awale Elmi, RISE Projects

Continuing support

Finally, thanks to the generous support from Amazon Future Engineer, we were able to equip each participating organisation with Raspberry Pi 400 kits so that the youth leaders can practise and share the skills and knowledge they gained on the course at their centres and the organisations can offer computing activities in-house.

Over the next 12 months, we will continue to work with each of these youth and community organisations, supporting them to establish their coding clubs, and helping to ensure that young people in their communities get a fair and equal opportunity to engage and create with technology, no matter their background or challenges they are facing.

“It was really great. The online courses are excellent and being in-person to get answers to questions really helped. The tinkering was really useful and having people on hand to answer questions [was] massively useful.” – Liam Garnett, Leeds Libraries

For more information about how we can support youth and community organisations in the UK to start their own coding clubs, please send us a message with the subject ‘Partnerships’.

The post Working with UK youth and community organisations to tackle the digital divide appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Preparing young children for a digital world | Hello World #21

Post Syndicated from Sway Grantham original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/preparing-young-children-digital-world-hello-world-21/

How do we teach our youngest learners digital and computing skills? Hello World‘s issue 21 will focus on this question and all things primary school computing education. We’re excited to share this new issue with you on Tuesday 30 May. Today we’re giving you a taste by sharing an article from it, written by our own Sway Grantham.

Cover of Hello World issue 21.

How are you preparing young children for a world filled with digital technology? Technology use of our youngest learners is a hotly debated topic. From governments to parents and from learning outcomes to screen-time rules, everyone has an opinion on the ‘right’ approach. Meanwhile, many young children encounter digital technology as a part of their world at home. For example in the UK, 87 percent of 3- to 4-year-olds and 93 percent of 5- to 7-year-olds went online at home in 2023. Schools should be no different.

A girl doing digital making on a tablet

As educators, we have a responsibility to prepare learners for life in a digital world. We want them to understand its uses, to be aware of its risks, and to have access to the wide range of experiences unavailable without it. And we especially need to consider the children who do not encounter technology at home. Education should be a great equaliser, so we need to ensure all our youngest learners have access to the skills they need to realise their full potential.

Exploring technology and the world

A major aspect of early-years or kindergarten education is about learners sharing their world with each other and discovering that everyone has different experiences and does things in their own way. Using digital technology is no different.

Allowing learners to share their experiences of using digital technology both accepts the central role of technology in our lives today and also introduces them to its broader uses in helping people to learn, talk to others, have fun, and do work. At home, many young learners may use technology to do just one of these things. Expanding their use of technology can encourage them to explore a wider range of skills and to see technology differently.

A girl shows off a robot she has built.

In their classroom environment, these explorations can first take place as part of the roleplay area of a classroom, where learners can use toys to show how they have seen people use technology. It may seem counterintuitive that play-based use of non-digital toys can contribute to reducing the digital divide, but if you don’t know what technology can do, how can you go about learning to use it? There is also a range of digital roleplay apps (such as the Toca Boca apps) that allow learners to recreate their experiences of real-world situations, such as visiting the hospital, a hair salon, or an office. Such apps are great tools for extending roleplay areas beyond the resources you already have.

Another aspect of a child’s learning that technology can facilitate is their understanding of the world beyond their local community. Technology allows learners to explore the wider world and follow their interests in ways that are otherwise largely inaccessible. For example:

  • Using virtual reality apps, such as Expeditions Pro, which lets learners explore Antarctica or even the bottom of the ocean
  • Using augmented reality apps, such as Octagon Studio’s 4D+ cards, which make sea creatures and other animals pop out of learners’ screens
  • Doing a joint project with a class of children in another country, where learners blog or share ‘email’ with each other

Each of these opportunities gives children a richer understanding of the world while they use technology in meaningful ways.

Technology as a learning tool

Beyond helping children to better understand our world, technology offers opportunities to be expressive and imaginative. For example, alongside your classroom art activities, how about using an app like Draw & Tell, which helps learners draw pictures and then record themselves explaining what they are drawing? Or what about using filters on photographs to create artistic portraits of themselves or their favourite toys? Digital technology should be part of the range of tools learners can access for creative play and expression, particularly where it offers opportunities that analogue tools don’t.

Young learners at computers in a classroom.

Using technology is also invaluable for learners who struggle with communication and language skills. When speaking is something you find challenging, it can often be intimidating to talk to others who speak much more confidently. But speaking to a tablet? A tablet only speaks as well as you do. Apps to record sounds and listen back to them are a helpful way for young children to learn about how clear their speech is and practise speech exercises. ChatterPix Kids is a great tool for this. It lets learners take a photo of an object, e.g. their favourite soft toy, and record themselves talking about it. When they play back the recording, the app makes it look like the toy is saying their words. This is a very engaging way for young learners to practise communicating.

Technology is part of young people’s world

No matter how we feel about the role of technology in the lives of young people, it is a part of their world. We need to ensure we are giving all learners opportunities to develop digital skills and understand the role of technology, including how people can use it for social good.

A woman and child follow instructions to build a digital making project at South London Raspberry Jam.

This is not just about preparing them for their computing education (although that’s definitely a bonus!) or about online safety (although this is vital — see my articles in Hello World issue 15 and issue 19 for more about the topic). It’s about their right to be active citizens in the digital world.

So I ask again: how are you preparing young children for a digital world?

Subscribe to the Hello World digital edition for free

The first experiences children have with learning about computing and digital technologies are formative. That’s why primary computing education should be of interest to all educators, no matter what the age of your learners is. This issue covers for example:

And there’s much more besides. So don’t miss out on this upcoming issue of Hello World — subscribe for free today to receive every PDF edition in your inbox on the day of publication.

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The post Preparing young children for a digital world | Hello World #21 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

A vocational digital skills course in Kakuma refugee camp: Connecting to learners’ lives

Post Syndicated from Wariara Waireri original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/vocational-digital-skills-kakuma-refugee-camp-learners-experience/

We are working in partnership with Amala Education to pilot a vocational skills course for displaced learners aged 16 to 25 in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya.

Learners in a classroom learning vocational digital skills.

Kakuma camp was set up in Kenya in 1992, following a civil war in neighbouring South Sudan in East Africa. Today, 2 million people are living in the camp, and 61% are 18 and younger.

An aerial view of living spaces in Kakuma refugee camp.

We’ve designed a 100-hour, 10-week course called Using online digital technologies to create change for the Amala learners in Kakuma camp. The course focused on digital skills including making media and websites, with its content we adapted from our Computing Curriculum. The course pilot was delivered alongside Amala’s High School Diploma programme, which is the first internationally accredited course programme enabling refugee and host community youth to complete their education through flexible study.

Our thanks go to the Ezrah Charitable Trust for generously funding our work in this partnership.

Sharing lessons we are learning

We are learning a lot during this pilot, so we are writing a set of three blogs to share these lessons with you.

Today’s blog is Amala Education‘s perspective on their learners in Kakuma Camp, the purpose of digital skills education, and the course design and facilitation. We will also share our approach to adapting learning resources for the context of the Amala learners and using data to assess the course, and what other support we’ve put in place to ensure this educational project is self-sustaining.

Want to make computing education meaningful? Make it connect to learners’ lived experience

By Polly Akhurst (Co-founder and Co-Executive Director, Amala Education), Louie Barnett (Education Lead, Amala Education) & Ajak Mayen Jok (Programme Coordinator, Amala Education)

Our learners wanted a course that develops not just their digital literacy, but one that aligns with Amala’s agency-based learning model, which gives young people the skills to improve their communities. Many of our learners have limited experience of using digital tools but a huge desire to develop these skills, which they see as essential to improving their lives and the lives of their community members.

Learners in a classroom learning vocational digital skills.

So we knew we needed a course that not just builds learners’ technical knowledge and skills but can also enrich their lived experience. 

How would we do it? 

Enter the Raspberry Pi Foundation team. We combined Amala’s agency-based educational approach with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s experience in pedagogy and teaching about technology and digital literacy to design a course that truly resonates with our learners.

Developing a relevant digital skills course

Before developing the course, the Raspberry Pi Foundation team held focus groups with facilitators and learners in Kakuma camp to understand their needs. This helped them to pitch the 100 hours of course materials at the right level for the learners.

Learners in a classroom learning vocational digital skills.

We called the course Using online technologies to create change. It takes the learners on a journey, building their foundation elements of computing and digital literacy. Learners start by finding out how digital devices work using input, process, and output. Then they move on to understanding computer networks. The course includes hands-on activities related to creating media, like filming and reviewing content and creating and choosing sounds to use in a podcast. There is also some light-touch web development with HTML and JavaScript. At the end of the course, learners design and deliver a presentation that reflects the work they’ve completed.

“Before I joined the course, I really didn’t know much about how to operate technology, but through the learning and the process, now I am able to learn something that will be beneficial for me and the people in my community.” — Learner in Kakuma refugee camp

Throughout the course, learners use their newly gained skills and knowledge to make their own project aimed at creating positive change. One example project is this website developed by Shyaka Cedric and other learners, which shares how podcasts and remote learning helped their community stay safe and healthy during the pandemic. Another group of learners used their photography and design skills to develop ID cards to keep Amala students safe within the camp. Having an Amala student ID card protects learners because they can prove their identity to their community and the police.

Facilitators from the camp make the course relatable

One of the great things about this course is that the Amala facilitators who taught the learners look, speak, and sound like them. Amala facilitators are from within the camp, and that they are relatable is great for learners’ self-confidence.

A learner and a faciliator in a classroom learning digital skills.

Having the course facilitated by fellow refugees removes the stigmatisation that the learners are vulnerable and sets the precedent that they can do anything if they put their mind to it.

“It gave me power of… getting involved with new things…Any challenge that comes my way I am willing to take after the Raspberry Pi class now…” — Learner in Kakuma refugee camp

While the Raspberry Pi Foundation team worked to make the course content relevant for the learners, our facilitators further localised the content to ensure its relatability for learners. Local contextualisation helps students to understand what they are learning, and to identify with the content — it’s not something out of the blue for them. Localisation is also important because it helps implement one of Amala’s cornerstones: decolonising the African curriculum.

Digital literacy is an urgent need

Because the learners in Kakuma camp lead complex social lives and face high levels of precarity, we decided to make the pilot course optional through our existing Diploma programme. We anticipated a modest enrollment rate, but instead over 100 people within the Amala learner community expressed an interest in this 75-person course. This showed us that the value and urgency of digital literacy in refugee communities is more pertinent than ever.

In a world where a lack of access to technology and digital skills exacerbates existing inequalities, it is critically important for young people who are disadvantaged to access meaningful learning opportunities. As one learner put it:

“I want to study this course because the current world is a digital world and I would like to acquire the skills to boost my computer skills and be able to help myself by getting a job and transforming the community through the digital world.” — Learner in Kakuma refugee camp

So what’s happening next?

We have a blueprint of what works in Kakuma refugee camp, and we are also learning what doesn’t. Bringing these lessons together will help us offer the course to more learners in Kakuma, and adapt the content in other locations, like our site in Amman, Jordan. 

Look out for our follow-up blogs about the support we put in place to enable learners in Kakuma camp to participate in the course, and how we worked to create course content that is suitable for them.

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