Two local university computer science students have organized a summer camp to provide young people the opportunity to learn the valuable skill of computer coding.
Two local university computer science students have organized a summer camp to provide young people the opportunity to learn the valuable skill of computer coding.
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Merlin area resident Elliott Vince, 18, and Klare Rumble, 19, of Blenheim, teamed up to form a business called CodersBlock to offer the first of three Minecraft coding summer camp sessions beginning July 2.
“We aim to teach students to code in a fun, interactive way,” said Vince, who completed his first year at Queen’s University in Kingston. “We combine real-world programming technology with the popular video game Minecraft to help students explore computer science and other STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.”
Rumble, who is heading into her second year at Carleton University in Ottawa, said it’s possible to program in the Minecraft game.
“We look to expose coding in different ways and this is one of the ways we want to focus on in the summer camp,” she said.
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The two-week long camps are open to kids 10 to 16 and feature “pretty basic coding so everyone can get it,” Vince said.
“If there are people who do excel and want to keep going, we’re going to have extra things they can do if they want to challenge themselves,” he said.
Those who take the camp will definitely develop some great coding skills.
“This camp will actually get them pretty far into understanding coding concepts,” Rumble said.
She said they will be working mainly in the computer language Java.
“We’ll focus on teaching them how to write in that language and different concepts in that language,” Rumble said.
Vince said Minecraft was written in Java, which will allow campers to add custom features to the popular computer game.
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But, he added the skills learned can also be used to make a video game or business application or another computer program.
Rumble said the camp is giving kids who have been introduced to coding, and even those who haven’t, an opportunity “to really explore the possibilities of coding and kind of get more into it.”
Vince added: “Even if you’ve never touched coding at all, we basically want it so that kids can show up, learn something and take these skills and say, ‘Hey, I can do this, I’ve never done this before .’”
The idea for the camp came out of a discussion about summer jobs that Vince had with a friend at university, who suggested he start a coding camp.
“It just sort of clicked,” he said, recalling his days as a 13-year-old making plug-ins for a Minecraft server he owned.
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Vince contacted Rumble in March about the idea since “we both have the skills, we both have the ability.”
The Ursuline College Chatham graduates took computer science together while in the French immersion program at the Catholic high school.
“We started to brainstorm and really plan since then,” Rumble said.
She added they “hit the ground running” once they returned home from university for the summer.
Details on enrolling in the coding camp are at www.codersblock.ca.
Vince said a challenge was finding a venue for the camp. He said they will be operating out of Chatham-Kent secondary school.
“We’re very excited for the opportunity,” he said.
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