Many of you probably seen the BBC News article about the digital skills shortage that was published yesterday. This is something close to our hearts at RaspiKidd and micro:mag.
A lot of things mentioned in the article is why we do what we do at RaspiKidd and micro:mag
People going off to study digital courses at uni whether this is Software development, engineering or other IT-related courses and finding the materials to be outdated. I did exactly this after spending a good few years out of education and self-teaching digital skills and keeping up with technology I decided to go back to uni to do a masters in Computing which I never completed as I saw it as a waste of time as I was getting taught skills and programming languages that weren’t used within the industry.
This is partly why RaspiKidd and micro:mag were created as I wanted to encourage kids, teachers and parents to find relevant materials to cater to kids that have a passion for IT and digital making. Most recently I got asked to lead DundeeBots a project funded by the IET(Institution of Engineering and Technology) and IMechE (Institution of Mechanical Engineers) to create robotics kits and learning resources to use within Dundee schools and community groups to encourage kids into engineering and coding.
With Dundee being the tech capital of Scotland I would be interested to speak to local IT and Digital companies on how we could bridge this gap and encourage more kids to get excited about technology.
Read the full BBC article here