Social enterprise AFBE-UK Scotland has launched a coding skills club to equip young people with coding skills for future opportunities in the digital field.

The NextGen Coding Club will support young people aged from eight to 17 of all races, with special emphasis on children in the minority ethnic community.

AFBE-UK, which promotes diversity and inclusion and specifically encourages the pursuit of careers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, has already hosted its first club activities but a programme of events is scheduled for throughout 2021.

The next event is taking place during week commencing March 29 and is themed Games and Animation with Scratch. Club activities take place live online so that facilitators – including developers, programmers and software engineers – can provide one-to-one support for the young coders.

Commenting on the coding skills club, programme lead Dr Urenna Adegbotolu said: “The beauty of the coding club is that the young people are co-creators of the course curriculum and they engage in educating each other, so they’re acquiring other life skills during each session.

“We are excited about the coding club which was developed on the back of a series of online events we held in 2020 on computer coding. We hope that this club will enable pupils as young as eight to develop the skills that they need to be the STEM leaders of tomorrow.”

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A recent survey of prospective club members showed a keen interest in games and animation, robotics and app creation in particular. It has helped to shape a coding skills club programme from which members should acquire five main skills:

• Responsive website creation with HTML and PHP
• Games and Animation with Scratch
• Robotics with Lego We Do 2.0, Lego Mindstorm and Raspberry Pi
• Artificial Intelligence with python
• Make your App with C/python and mobile app creation.

Aberdeen-based AFBE-UK Scotland runs mentoring programmes that offer young people support with their STEM careers. This includes its school programme NextGen, where industry leaders and professionals give advice to pupils; Transition, where industry leaders give advice to aspiring engineering professionals on how to enter the job market; and Real Projects, where industry professionals pass on their expertise.