CodeCamp hits Birmingham

This summer saw Kainos host their first CodeCamp in Birmingham; a free two week camp aimed at encouraging 14-18 year old STEM students to kick-start their careers in technology. The camp hosted 40+ enthusiastic campers who travelled from not only Birmingham but also from distances as far as Bristol, Reading and Northern Ireland! As a female in the industry, it was a pleasure to see so many young females who wanted to get involved in tech.

During the first week of CodeCamp, the mentors taught the campers everything they needed to know about HTML and CSS so that they had all the knowledge they needed to create their own websites for a chance to win some top prizes from the fantastic prize pool (including an Oculus Go VR headset and a drone!). They also picked up other skills such as having consideration for website accessibility, website user experience and user interactions, using wireframes to plan their website design, creating chat-bot's with Java and how to use tools to access a website's quality.

Guest talks and breakout sessions were also organised throughout the two weeks to help equip our campers with knowledge in other areas such as data manipulation, soft skills and presentation skills with our slideshow karaoke activity, CVs, interviews & careers advice from our recruitment team, advice and tools for developers - just to new a few! The campers even got the chance to experience a VR headset playing the Beat Saber game and they got some real life hands-on experience of working as a tester, helping to test the NHS App developed by Kainos.

The second week saw the campers put their knowledge to the test as they spent it creating their individual websites. A science-fair style judging on the last day of the event helped short list the top 11 websites. The top 11 finalists then had to present in a Dragon's Den style to a panel of skilled professional guest judges for their chance to win from the top prizes. Thank you to Greg Dash, Matt Doherty and Charles Luo for taking on such a difficult task of having judge the top 3 projects out of so many amazing ones!