This page is for those involved in the computing industry who would like to support computing education by volunteering in some way.

As an industry volunteer, you can raise the profile of computing education by talking about your work with parents and young people, sharing information with schools, volunteering to working with teachers, running coding clubs, mentoring young people, providing careers talks,  influencing your organisation to get involved, creating fun educational material, and more

Opportunities in London include:

1. Talk about working in technology,

• often children don’t know about careers opportunities or what great jobs there are in our industry, so talk about it to children you know!
• Read our fun magazines and booklets about computer science with children you know and do computational thinking activities with them.

2. Share information with your local school.

• Help them signup for free class sets of PRIMARY & SECONDARY cs4fn magazines,
• Get free resources & teacher training from Barefoot Computing, Teaching London Computing, NCCE,   Techpathways,  Royal Institution  Digital School House,  RaspberryPi Education , STEM Learning & Computing At School. (Take a flyer or magazine to the school, or forward this page to them!)

3. Volunteer!  There are a number of groups who will train you and match you to schools who have asked for help.

• Barefoot Computing (deliver introductory PRIMARY teacher workshops on computing) – you are matched to a school near you, you can deliver one workshop or as many as you like (you could do this as a pair),
• Code Club (run after school kids clubs – usually in PRIMARY SCHOOLS) – you find or are matched to a school near you and deliver a weekly after school club (you could do this as a group),
• Coderdojo (help at kids coding workshops),
•  STEMNET Ambassador, Founders4Schools, STEMettes, CodeFirstGirls (young people mentoring, training & school career presentations),
• Volunteer through one of the many ambassador programs where you will be sent opportunities to give talks in schools
  • STEM Ambassador
  • Founders4Schools

4. Influence your organisation to sign up for  London Ambitions (connect your organisation with London schools and colleges) and Tech Talent Charter (to address gender and diversity in tech).

5. Create materials on computing.

• Write articles on computing topics for the cs4fn website and magazine or
• if you prefer fiction write a computational thinking tale a short story with a computing lesson for us to share.
• Create computing linked puzzles like phonic kris kross, word search or pixel puzzles for us to share. If you have a suitable child handy get them to help  – eg choose words, pictures to use from pixabay or evaluate it for you. Or they could just create the whole puzzle.

6. Join CAS! Computing at Schools with over 30,000 members represents computing educators across the UK.

7. Re-train to be a computing teacher! There are bursaries available to help you retrain such as the BCS Scholarship Scheme.

More information

Find out more information about volunteering, or to talk about larger scale volunteer events or setting up your own school support programme please email Jane Waite on j.l.waite@qmul.ac.uk or Jo Brodie on j.brodie@qmul.ac.uk.

This page has been produced by CAS London andTeaching London Computing as they work to support schools deliver the computing curriculum in London.