Northern Ireland's local tech firms have been really helping students and young people get early coding experience in recent years, and Belfast-headquartered Kainos is no exception. Not all schools in Northern Ireland teach topics such as programming early enough or at all, so many young people rely on events such as CoderDojo or Kainos CodeCamp to get hands-on with code.
Kainos is kicking things off again this summer in partnership with Queen’s University Belfast to run two free-to-attend coding events, each with over 100 spots available. CodeCamp will take place between July 22nd and August 2ndand is aimed at school students between 14 and 18 years of age who are currently studying any STEM subjects.
The CodeCamp event will be split into a Foundation Course for 14-16 year olds where they will learn how to build an app from scratch, and an Advanced course for 17-18 year olds (or 14-16 year olds who have previously attended a CodeCamp) that will teach HTML, Javascipt, and CSS for web-development.
Shortly after from August 19th to August 30th is the A.I.Camp, which is open to undergraduates who are interested in artificial intelligence / machine learning and are currently studying a related degree. The practical course will teach AI theory and leads into
a 12 hour machine learning hackathon to put that theory to the test and solve some real world problems.
Kainos' Social Responsibility Manager Gemma Crothers commented: "The demand for tech talent is growing at an incredible pace thanks to rapid advances in emerging technologies and the skills gap is getting wider. Our way of addressing the problem was to create Kainos Academy as a way to invest not only in our current employees, but also in the future workforce."
"Furthermore, we are calling for more girls to join the tech industry in order to achieve a truly balanced workforce. Encouragingly 40% of our codecampers last year were female and we are proactively creating role models to inspire and show these girls that there are valued roles, at all levels for them in tech."
To apply for either event, head over to
www.kainos.com/academy quickly as places are sure to go quickly.
Source: Written based on press release
