Innovation Fund Feedback from our friend Ali at The Learning Club Community Association

The Learning Club Community Association (LCCA) was awarded the Innovation Fund to provide an inclusive, collaborative educational programme to help people in Grenfell catchments experiment, participate and collaborate in new and specially design, bespoke infrequent projects such as designing, building and programming Robots.

This was a STEM bespoke project that included planning, designing, coding, building and programming Robots. Participants managed to use Python programming language which is one of the most popular languages in the world as well as other embedded languages.

Participants were able to successfully complete a foundation level handout that consisted of 35 challenges and exercise with instructions to connect to and program raspberry robots.

The programme had interests from about 35-40 residents. However, they could only accommodate 14 young people based on their age, commitment and availability. Two of participants had to leave the project halfway due to work related reasons and 12 participants successfully completed the programme.

Some of the key observations that Ali identified with the participants include:

• The commitment of participants was impressive as attendance was excellent even though the project was not easy and most of the participants were beginners.
• Female participants were very remarkable and very competitive with the male participants.
• Most of the participants mentioned that, the project helped them with their IT studies and problem solving and would pursue a career in IT as a result.

Some of the feedback from the participants includes:

“Actually, I developed a lot of skills by attending the project at the learning club, the information that I had before joining the course was very little, but now I feel very confident with my coding and problem solving skills and abilities”

“Learning at the Learning Club was an amazing experience; I’m really in touch now with programming and robotics. I am also going to pursue my dream to become a software engineer.”

“My first ever code/program was “Hello world” during the project which was a great feeling.

“I used to believe that coding is not for everyone, but after 4 sessions at the learning club, I changed my mind and my future will change accordingly!”

Ali fed back: “We believe that the project was successful as 12 out of 14 participants completed the project successfully. The project helped the participants with their studies in particular in the IT/computer science subject, life day to day problem solving, communication and working with others and also helped them to decide to pursue careers in IT”.