Wilmslow Town Council voted unanimously in favour of a grant application from a free programming group for young people and invited them to come back with another application for further funds.
Wilmslow CoderDojo, an organisation set up to teach young people to write computer programs and websites, applied for a grant of £1643.
The application, which came via the SK9 Group, was put together by some of the group's youth mentors - Matthew Beton, Cole Boardman, Tom Curran, and Tom Nolan who are all students at Wilmslow High School - with only a little support from adult mentors Linsday Martin and Bill Beton.
The volunteer led group will use the money to recondition 20 second hand laptops which were donated to them by Newton Primary School in New Mills. They will also purchase software licenses and laptop covers, so they are easily identifiable as Coderdojo laptops.
The laptops will then be loaned to young people who do not have access to pcs at home, so they can continue to work on their projects between the CoderDojo sessions, and the youth mentors so that they can develop their own training and mentoring skills at home and then bring them back to help teach the younger children.
Rob Curran spoke at the Town Council meeting. He explained "We are an entirely volunteer led organisation, we help young people develop their coding skills. What we mean by coding is understanding more about technology, understanding how other things that we take for granted these days such as apps on our mobile phones, websites etc work.
"The reason we do this is because all the volunteers who support CoderDojo, not just in Wilmslow but nationally and globally, are targeting a projected skills shortage of about half a million jobs in Europe on the digital agenda by the time some of the kids reach employment age.
"Understanding digital life is now key to our kids growing up and understanding the economy they are going to engage with."
Set up in November 2013, Wilmslow CoderDojo is a monthly club which meets at Wilmslow High School on the 4th Sunday of each month. Typically about 50 children attend each month and it is entirely run by volunteer parents.
To date they have not received any funding and since they started in Wilmslow 11 months ago 212 kids have come through their door, about 40% of whom have become regular attendees.
The group has relied entirely on the generosity of parents, in terms of time and the parents acting as mentors for those children but they also have a number of children who have become mentors themselves for some of the younger ones.
Rob said "There are two key principles to CoderDojo. It's free, so we don't charge anyone for attending, and we also want to make it open to everyone. At the moment a lot of the activities do actually require the kids to come along with a laptop or some kind of computing device that they can work on.
"A lot of the work we do is project work so what we try to do is send the kids home to work on their coding projects and bring them to CoderDojo to trouble shoot them and use the mentors. We found that we are not able to say we are open to all because we can't at the moment accommodate kids who haven't got the luxury of their own hardware, their own devices.
"We were kindly donated 20 laptops by a primary school out in New Mills which are a sufficient spec for us to use but unfortunately those laptops need cleaning, repurposing, reconditioning and importantly we need to buy licenses for them."
In addition to creating a pool of laptops which are available to loan out to children that are keen but do not have the hardware at home to practise and develop their skills, the group wants to have some of laptops available for older attendees to use, with all of the required software, so they can become fully fledged mentors.
Rob added "There are opportunities for mentors like myself to go and fly the flag for CoderDojo, so for example last week we were at the EU Parliament in Brussels, we were one of only two CoderDojos from the UK as part of a big CoderDojo initiative for the week representing the UK and Wilmslow in that room.
"What we really want to do is make sure that some of our older youths that come, probably from 14 through to 18 years old, get opportunities to be tooled up to become practitioners in a coding language but also to become mentors for the younger kids. If we get them up to becoming youth mentors they'll have opportunities to access places they haven't before."
Cllr Keith Purdom asked why they had requested for so little money and what they would do if they were provided with additional funds.
The grant was approved unanimiously and Wilmslow CoderDojo were invited to come back to the Town Council with a subsequent application.
Rob Curran commented "We're so pleased that Wilmslow Town Council is behind us and is funding 100% of the bid. It will make a huge difference to what we can offer the youth in our area and represents a huge step forward given that everything we do relies 100% on volunteers and good will."
Wilmslow CoderDojo's next meeting will take place on Sunday November 30th Sunday from 10am to 2pm. For further information email [email protected].
Photo: (l-r) Cole Boardman, Lindsay Martin and Tom Curran.
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