Member Article

BJSS and Turinglab partner to advance STEM education

BJSS, the award-winning, delivery focused IT consultancy, today announces a community investment partnership with Turinglab, an organisation dedicated to teaching fundamental coding skills to school children aged between 11 and 16. The partnership will see BJSS finance 100 scholarships each year for children from low income families, initially in Leeds and Manchester. BJSS will also play a key delivery role, providing Turinglab with pro-bono software development expertise, in addition to marketing and commercial support.

Turinglab was founded by Sam Green and Henry Lake in 2015 with the aim of improving digital-skill focused STEM education in the UK. The 10-week long programme teaches computing skills in a blended-learning environment supported by local Turinglab-trained university students, and a creative project-based software tool with content designed specifically for children. The organisation has already provided over 5,000 hours of learning as the delivery partner to the outreach and diversity initiatives of Imperial College London’s Department of Computing.

In addition to BJSS’ financial and commercial investments, and to support both organisation’s desire to improve STEM and Computing education in the UK, Dr. Glynn Robinson, managing director of BJSS, will join the Turinglab advisory board. This will aid the development of the programme, ensuring that it continues to address the key skills required by the UK technology sector, and will also help Turinglab to expand across the northern UK.

Glynn Robinson, MD at BJSS, said: “Our community investment in Turinglab is a fantastic demonstration of how students, business and universities are collaborating to address the UK’s IT skills gap. We’re especially excited about helping children from disadvantaged backgrounds learn more about technology and ensuring that they are not excluded from Britain’s digital future.”

Sam Green, Founder of Turinglab, said: “BJSS is the perfect partner for us to drive and expand our programme across the UK. We created Turinglab to pass on skills we thought were crucial to the next generation in an increasingly digital world. Never has it been more critical for the UK to address the digital skills gap, and we’re delighted to be working with BJSS to help make this vision a reality.”

Professor Susan Eisenbach, Imperial College London, adds: “We are in the digital age and those without digital skills will be left behind. The evidence shows that girls and children from low-income families are disengaging early on precluding them from providing digital solutions in the future. Imperial College Department of Computing has been very pleased to support Turinglab’s Saturday programming classes for girls and low-income children. We do this because we believe that they excite children about computing and help them develop digital skills. This is a long term goal and we are pleased that organisations such as BJSS are supporting Turinglab to deliver similar programmes throughout Britain.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by David Martin .