One of our primary drivers as an IT staffing firm is locating the best talent from an ever-shrinking talent pool. It is what we do best, yet becomes increasingly more difficult as the talent pool shrinks (and retires) as time marches on. It is imperative to get the next generation of students excited in careers in IT to fill future roles that are guaranteed to become available. We’ve addressed the issue of getting kids into code by outlining ways you can get involved yourself. You can’t necessarily teach a tech career in a few courses or to just anyone, the skills needed are very particular and innate in personalities who love to play with the underpinnings of how systems operate. The key is developing tools and teaching techniques to get kids excited about developing tech, not just toying with Video Games and iDevices as users – being tech savvy but not being driven to engineer.
One of the latest new inventions that encourage the greater movement to get Kids to Code has really taken things to the next level in both flexibility and affordability to hopefully get simple, exciting objects of tech into kid’s hands. Check out this ingenious new coding concept from the Microrobotics Lab at Harvard University, tiny programmable robots that are cheap, fun, and accessible and destined for classrooms. Thanks to efforts by Harvard’s popupCAD, an open source software framework is being developed to program super cool “Origami” tiny robots, free for public use and maintained as any other software language in a ‘GitHub’ style open source repository of code, designs, and documentation/support. In her article in BetaBoston.com, @NidiSubhs speaks to the ideas already in motion and refers to the robotic devices as “part flat-pack Ikea furniture, part pop-up birthday card.”
Tiny Robots, Image via BetaBoston, Harvard Graduate School of Design
They look like this – tiny paper like critters that can move and even walk but the concept can get far more complex and are already being attached to practical applications at a much more advanced level, for example Nano surgery. They could, for example, be entered into the bloodstream and sent to repair parts of the body (in theory).
The key component to the popupCAD project is that by using 3D Printers which are currently arriving on the doorsteps of most schools and libraries, the components can be printed cheaply, easily, and repeatedly so every student can produce something uniquely theirs, as complex as they wish. They can design, develop, and code the movements of the tiny bots as their own and come to fully understand the complexity of programming.
So let’s keep the conversation going on ways to get kids excited about programming. With tech talent at a premium and an astounding number of projected tech jobs opening up with no one to fill them, it is projects like this that will help to ensure the next generation of kids will be prepared for the IT challenges to come.
This blog was written by Market Street Talent’s Social Engagement Manager, Rich Collins. Be sure to follow Market Street Talent via our Facebook, Google+ Twitter, or Linkedin channels to learn more. #MSTgetsIT
