Summer Holiday Activities

Over here in the UK it is the school Summer Holidays. For parents this means finding activities to keep young minds active, interested and from saying the dreaded words of “I’m bored”. This can be hard when trying to keep educational / facts flowing over the summer break.

For parents with young coders here are a few suggestions for stuff to do;

Learn with YouTube – TV during the summer holidays can be a bit bland when it comes to educational shows and the streaming services mainly offer entertainment, so why not hit up YouTube. There some fantastic YouTube Channels available including Ted-Ed and PBS’ Crash Course. My current favourite are the Ted-Ed talk on how computer memory works:

and the Crash Course on Computer Science, delivering Computer lessons in small 10 to 15 minutes bursts:

Code – there are a few summer coding camps / activities across the UK. There are also the fantastic free resources available from Code Club ( https://codeclubprojects.org/ ) which include notes for educators (or parents!) to help inspire young minds with ideas. There is also CoderDojo ( https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/coderdojo ) and Code.org ( https://studio.code.org/projects/public ).

Visit computer based attractions – There a few computer based attractions in the UK including (but not limited to):

• Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester) – I visited earlier in the summer with my son for the Power UP! event. MOSI is also home to a replica of Baby, one of the first computers.
• National Science and Media Museum (Bradford) – My son enjoyed his visit to the Media Museum, getting the the chance to see technology use in media.

  

  Apple II computer at National Science and Media Museum

•  National Museum of Computing (Milton Keynes) – Based at Bletchley Park , the National Museum of Computing is home to the machines that helped the Allies to win World War II, and also includes mainframes, early PCs and video games consoles. It is on my list of places I want to visit but have not yet been to.
• Centre for Computing History (Cambridge) – Nostalgia Nerd visited and YouTubed about the Centre for Computing History on his YouTube channel. Again, I place I’ve not yet visited:

• Memorials – there a few memorials based around the UK to those that did fantastic things for the world of computing. For example, Manchester has the Alan Turing memorial. Why not try and track some down?

I’m hoping some of these activity ideas will help parents keep there young one(s) entertained.