Hacking festival attracts 500 aspiring young coders

Hacking festival attracts 500 aspiring young coders

 

 

 The Young Rewired State Festival of Code is returning for a fourth year, with a record-breaking 500 aspiring programmers expected to attend.The week-long hacking event, which saw just 50 youngsters take part in 2009, is fast gaining popularity and this year has the support of 50 local businesses around the country, acting as centres for the young coders to learn, hack and create using open-source government data under the guidance of experts and mentors. For Emma Mulqueeny, founder of Rewired State, the good news provides much-needed proof that there is in fact a desire in this country for such creative outlets.

 

“At the beginning, a lot of people said ‘what’s the point, why are you doing it?’ They thought I was forcing poor kids to come and play in the government trough,” Mulqueeny told Wired.co.uk. “Even in the developer community people were saying just let the kids come to it, don’t force the issue”.

 

After initially attracting just three participants back in 2009, Mulqueeny could have been forgiven for beginning to believe her critics. But she ploughed on and, after looking a little closer, discovered pockets of youths across the country desperate for exactly the kind of open creative space Rewired State offered.

 

“All these individual kids were stuck in their bedrooms. Something we kept hearing from schools was, ‘no we don’t teach coding because no one’s smart enough, but oh yes, there’s this one kid in the library’”.

After finally scraping together enough participants to fill the office space provided by Google for the weekend, Mulqueeny gathered her fifty teenagers — including one flown down from deepest darkest Scotland — for a few days of teaching, coding and invention. The results from these self-taught teens blew her away.

 

“These were bored, isolated kids that wanted to make stuff. That was the magic, to watch them blossom from being non-communicative and unsure whether what they were doing was any good, into massive show offs.”

 

With past students returning as alumni mentors the community is growing and, according to Mulqueeny, so is the young coders’ confidence.

 

Last year the 2011 winners created a selection of impressive apps including a pedestrian heat map which flags up congested areas, and a broadband data map plotting out high-speed zones. However, one entry in particular entry stood out for Mulqueeny, who relayed the story of the event’s youngest entrant, a seven-year-old boy. On presenting his program to the panel on the final day he challenged a government judge because he had not been granted access to the Met Office data required to complete his app — a system that let students know whether or not they could cycle to school, depending on the forecast.

 

Ministers are apparently beginning to take note of this increasingly vocal group. Last year one government department came to Young Rewired State with a request. They were due to release some data and wanted to see how the developer community would engage with it and how they would choose to organise it. The community they chose was Young Rewired State.

 

“It’s a very interesting societal change, the way people are engaging with young developers,” says Mulqueeny. “By saying, ‘we’ve got this data, it’s about you, can you go and explore it please’, their relationship with those kids is much more real than anything they could have achieved by sending out a press release and hoping the kids would read it.”

 

“What organisations sometimes forget is these kids will grow up and some will be politicians, some will be civil servants and some will be the very people sitting there saying we must do something about this data,” she added.

 

This year the prize-giving weekend will take place at Birmingham’s Custard Factory, where participants present their final program after a mass sleepover. It’s all free, so Mulqueeny has relied on donations made via peoplefund.it and sponsors (for example Google). Despite this year’s encouraging turnout, Mulqueeny says the number of girls enrolling remains an issue. Around 15 percent initially sign up each year and 10 percent of these drop out before the event. After drawing attention to the issue, numbers plummeted even more, so there is definitely a lofty hurdle that needs to be crossed here.

 

Nevertheless, with numbers growing and the age of entrants dropping each year, Young Rewired State has proved there is a seemingly quiet community of young creators looking for opportunities just like this. An opportunity for them to prove they’re not so quiet after all.