Last week saw Capgemini and The Prince’s Trust deliver their first ‘Get Started’ course in Newcastle upon Tyne. Through their digital partnership, they have so far supported over 170 young people gain digital skills, develop employability skills and confidence. These courses have a significant impact in helping to turn young lives around and unlocking their potential.
This ‘Get Started with Apps’ course, focused on creating a mobile app, took place at Campus North, a co-working and event space for tech meetups, start-ups and established businesses – a great creative space for the young people.
Attended by 9 young people, it was an intense week and in a short space of time they went from brainstorming, researching, wire framing, designing, coding and prototyping an app ready for pitching and presenting by the end of the week.
Three prototype apps were created. There was ‘Moxie’ for setting tasks and challenges and bringing people together on those; ‘Restaurant Booker’ which would allow you to turn up at a new venue, look it up and book direct ‘Uber’ style; and the ‘Ideas Map’ with flash cards and mind mapping to help you plan your work.
At the end of the week the young people presented their ideas to a panel of judges, including MP for Newcastle Central and Shadow Minister for Industrial Strategy, Science & Innovation, Chi Onwurah commented:
“Newcastle, the north east and indeed our country depends on people being able to get to grips with tech, digital, apps and with the jobs of the future in the way the young people have done at the Prince’s Trust. It’s been a pleasure to attend the celebration event where 3 groups of young people presented on their app ideas and clearly had put in a tremendous effort, creativity and technical ability to present their prototypes at the end of an intense week.”
Matt Oakley, Executive Vice President at Capgemini based in Newcastle also commented: “It was really inspiring to see young people developing innovative apps as a way of getting their lives on track. It is fabulous to be able to support such a strong and digitally inspired initiative through our The Prince’s Trust partnership.”
