For three years, Young Rewired State has been showing young people the joys of coding using open government data such as crime figures and weather data. This year, Newcastle got involved for the first time. JOHN HILL finds out more about how everyone got on, and how the project may help raise interest in a valued skill.
“I think the nearest one was Manchester, or maybe Edinburgh”, he says: “I hadn’t come across one in Newcastle. I thought it was something that was definitely needed.
“When I was growing up I always thought no one else enjoyed this sort of stuff. I probably would have worked at it even more if I’d have been able to get involved with something like this.”
After finding a home in the Centre for Life, Wood and fellow programmer David Haywood Smith set about guiding a group of seven teenagers, most of whom had very little idea of what coding involved.
“We kicked everything off by talking about open data”, he says. “It’s only really in the last couple of years that the really good quality data has come out.
“We were showing them a few of the things that can be built with this data. They then split into four groups. Most of the process was them coming up with ideas and the mentors helping them with coding and finding decent data sources.”
The ideas that came out of Newcastle included a Space Invaders-style game which alters depending on the weather outside and the crime data of the city assigned to a particular level.
There was also a mobile phone app which allowed users to gauge the levels of sunlight in their area for renewable energy installation, as well as the level of grants they can pick up in their region.
Using Google Maps and public data, one created a program which could plot the quality of schools in an area, while the other group created a Google Chrome plug-in called QRome which enables someone reading a website to scan a QR code on the site with their phone and transfer that page to their phone to read on the move.
“The ideas they came up with blew my socks off”, says Wood.
The thinking behind the Young Rewired State project is that potential programmers should be reached early and inspired to fine-tune their skills in their spare time, especially if they are not being taught these tricks during the school day. This idea appealed to the Centre for Life, which looks to inspire young people outside classes with events such as Maker Faire.
Science communications director Ian Simmons says: “People were learning new science and technology skills through it by developing their learning skills. Because they were doing it with government data, they were giving the public greater access to data presented in an imaginative way.
