The college organised an event using state of the art applications to inspire over 300 pupils from local schools across the Mid Ulster Area. Additionally, Computing students worked together with Level 3 Travel & Tourism students in order to run the tutorials on the day. These tutorials included TouchDevelop, Scratch, App Inventor and Lego Robots. Level 3 Computing students set up a temporary webpage and twitter account to promote the event. #hourofcode
Organiser of the event Kevin Meehan, Computing lecturer at Northern Regional College explains ‘It is important that students are engaged at a young age to develop their computational thinking skills. The Hour of Code event will help the students think about their educational future and inform them about what is possible through Computer Programming. This will help reduce the ongoing skills gap in Northern Ireland and equip the students to meet the future needs of the knowledge economy.’
Presentations and workshops from external organisations such as Allsate NI and Microsoft took place throughout the day adding value to visiting students and keeping them up to date with the latest software and trends.
