Volunteering @ CDW STEMettes Hackathon December 2019

At the start of December 2019 I volunteered at another amazing event ran by CDW, who I work for, and the STEMettes.

The second CDW STEMettes event! CDW UK hosted the event at our Head Office in central London on the 6th of December 2019.

The event was attended by around 35+ girls from the ages of 11 to 15 years old for the entire day. They were all also from local schools that had entered to be a part of the day!

The Theme Of The Event

At this CDW STEMettes event the theme was solely focused on building a basic website/web app in raw HTML, with some CSS and JavaScript, around the theme of well-being.

Lots of the teams focused on mental health websites / web apps; which I found very interesting to see!

Why Did I Choose To Volunteer?

As I mentioned in my previous blog post about the last STEMettes event I volunteered at: I really enjoying helping anyone learn technology.

I get a real kick out of it when the people you are training start picking it up and running away with building upon the knowledge you have shared with them. Everyone thinks in different ways so this normally leads to development ideas that you may of never even considered; and that’s super powerful and is why I’m a massive advocate for collaboration.

Also as previously mentioned my wife, Kate, is a secondary school geography teacher here in the UK and is a strong supporter of STEM and STEMettes at her school. So when I spoke about the event over dinner one evening, she was super happy to see me wanting to be involved again.

My Key Takeaways From The Event

Yet again the talent and skills of these young women was astounding! One team managed to build a very functional and aesthetically pleasing web app within the first 30 minutes. And I have to say the code was formatted perfectly too!

Another key thing I took away was how easy it is to pick up the basics of HTML and CSS and get visible results fast! Googling and finding code snippets and examples is a great way to learn as long as you make sure you understand what is being copied into your code.

This was one thing I really wanted to get across to the girls at this event, as it’s something we all do in the industry; and most are happy to admit too!

Glitch is also great tool to help people of all ages get to grips with the basics of HTML and CSS and see the results very quickly too! And best of all it’s free to use; so go check it out!

Here’s to the next STEM/STEMettes event in 2020!