Digital Makers: Useful tools and resources

Here are some great examples of existing resources that encourage digital making (the type of learning opportunities we want to see more students engaged with) – ranging from online tools that teach programming skills and creative thinking, to ‘hack days’, where developers work in teams to create cool new websites and apps:

Tools: Learn while you hack

Thimble, the latest tool from Mozilla, enables users to write and edit HTML and CSS, making web pages in minutes, but crucially also helping start-up projects get the creative ball rolling. Users are also invited to participate in ‘hackable’ web pages.

Scratch is a simple programming language making it easy to create your own interactive products and then share your creations online – helping young people learn computational ideas, think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively. The site supports its users with forums offering peer-to-peer advice, whether you’re a creator or an educator.

It's this enabling of creative self-expression and easy access to the tools to get started that lies at the heart of our Digital Makers campaign, as Mozilla puts it, "to move people from using the web to making the web". But it's not just about DIY websites...

Events and hackathons

Young Rewired State runs hack events, taking between 10-150 up and coming developers and providing "money, time, space, caffeine, sugar and food" to enable the creation of software prototypes also aimed at solving problems.

Example products include 'Recast', designed to play social media posts in line with shows on iPlayer, and 'Eureka! Immerse yourself in knowledge', which enables teachers and students to log data against concepts within video narrative. This can then be analysed to see which concepts were the most interesting in class. Their video from last year's event shows activities from the 14 centres up and down the country with children learning how to hack apps.

Apps

The number of Apple apps alone has risen from 25,000 to 645,000 in just over three years, and may pass the one million mark sometime in 2013, while more than 35 billion apps have now been downloaded from its App Store. The sheer number of apps available may provide variety for passive consumers such as game enthusiasts, but the technology can also be utilised to solve real-world challenges.

Apps for Good (one of the first projects to secure funding through the Innovation in Giving Fund, managed by Nesta) is no stranger to this challenge, currently training hundreds of young people to develop mobile and Facebook apps that address real-life problems. That's a lot of potential for students willing to learn and consumers alike.

Skill sharing

Meanwhile, Computing Plus bridges the gap between coders in the know and schools which recognise the importance of that knowledge. Their interactive map is an indicator of who has offered their help and who would like to utilise it. Their main goal is to facilitate computer science becoming a mainstream subject in primary and secondary schools by 2014.