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
