Wisdom committee members Erin Hales and Emma Smith have teamed up with Brilliant Club to create a new course for delivery through the Brilliant Club Scholars Programme.
Wisdom committee members Erin Hales and Emma Smith have teamed up with Brilliant Club to create a new course for delivery through the Brilliant Club Scholars Programme.
The Brilliant Club works with schools across the country to support less advantaged students to access university. This is achieved by inviting PhD students to deliver courses in schools.
Wisdom have partnered with The Brilliant Club to make a new course which looks at some elementary computer science topics and the work of women in computer science. This initiative is several years in the making and was originally started by previous Wisdom co-president Catherine Keele.
After months developing the course, in Autumn 2023, Erin trialled the delivery of the course in a school in Birmingham. The course was popular with the students who took part, and they enjoyed writing their own algorithms and learning about the work of computer scientists. Feedback from this trial version of the course will be used to finalise the course before it is rolled out to schools across the UK in Spring 2024.
Of the experience, Erin commented: “I've really enjoyed working with the students over the past term. It's amazing to see the students engaging with activities we spent a long time developing. One particular highlight was when a student shared her research about Grace Hopper and the origin of computer bugs with the class in a lesson where we found bugs in algorithms we wrote to make cups of tea.”
This was a huge effort for the Wisdom team, so congratulations to all involved, and our thanks to The Brilliant Club.
More information about The Brilliant Club can be found on their website. To find out more about Wisdom, and to sign up to the Wisdom mailing list to hear more about future outreach opportunities, enrol on our Moodle page.
