John Bradford is the inspiration behind Digilocal charity initiative supporting coding sessions for young people from 8 years old + across Bristol. Digilocal also refurbish and redeploy laptops to those most in need.

In this episode John shares with us the inspiration for launching Digilocal in particular to tackle the diversity in tech agenda to provide access to learning spaces for those most excluded from access to technology. John explains how the Digilocal coding clubs run, the role of volunteer mentors and the impact for young people. https://digilocal.org.uk/

Transcript

Annie Legge 0:00

Hi, welcome to the Tech for Good Southwest podcast and I'm your host for today Annie Legge. And today I'm delighted to welcome John Bradford, who is the lead and the vision behind Digilocal initiative across Bristol. So thank you for joining us, John.

John Bradford 0:14

Oh, thank you for the invitation, Annie.

Annie Legge 0:16

It's great. Firstly, can we start off with a little bit about your background? And I guess what led to the vision for Digilocal and just tell us all a bit about what that is?

John Bradford 0:25

Sure. I guess everything began in early 2015, I was running a community interest company called High Tech Bristol and Bath at the time. And that was focused on supporting the high tech community industry around Bristol and Bath. And we co hosted an event with local enterprise schools partnership, on the skills challenge facing the high tech sector.

One of the key questions in that event was around the lack of diversity in high tech. And it's widely recognised that there's a challenge there. And part of this workshop was to look at how we could locally at least help address some of those issues. And a lot of the questions were going as to why people weren't recruiting, why people weren't training, why people were going in. And the conversation ended up around primary school aged young people, and why so many of them don't see high tech as a career path. And one of the comments that came out of the group quite insightfuly was that everybody in high tech had a parent, or a friend of a parent or somebody in their parents social circle, who worked in high tech or had been to university and studied. And so that was their connection, introduction to that.

Many of the communities we were thinking about, those connections didn't exist. Was there something we could do across the Bristol and Bath region, to provide those young people with those experiences that we as engineers, I'm an engineer by training, that we as engineers had had that got us into this thing called high tech back when we were 5678 years old. And that's clearly a bigger challenge than we can tackle nationally. But I felt at the time for High Tech Bristol, & Bath, that was something we might look at developing locally, with the network of industry and connections that we had to give those young people those opportunities. So I had some funds from an event we'd hosted that we used to buy some laptops, I knew the Somalia Resource Centre, Barton Hills Settlement. So I asked them, if I rock up with 10 laptops and some cool stuff to do on them. Do you think you can fill the room with 10 young people from the community that might not otherwise get involved with technology. And eight years later, we are running Digilocal, with 18 Club sessions every week. And that's kind of the genesis. So it was always about giving those young people that don't have access to technology or to mentors within the technology space, the opportunity to figure out what it's all about.

Annie Legge 3:04

You mentioned the word sort of high tech, quite often I think you're referring to that in the context of engineering, can you give us a bit more of a definition of what's encompassed by that high tech concept?

John Bradford 3:18

It's a wonderfully elastic phrase, isn't it? We as as we've developed the thinking around Digilocal, and particularly our engagement with communities as young people, we've sort of drifted away from talking about high tech within the context of Digilocal. I won't say disconnect, but that tension, if you like, was one of the reasons we separated Digilocal out from High Tech Bristol and Bath and it became its own charity in 2019.

So what we now talk about with young people is building their problem solving skills, and building their resilience as young people. We do that through coding clubs, and project based activities. So the high tech is really software coding. But the focus is very much around developing problem solving skills, building resilience, developing those skills that they can take forward into any industry, any career they choose, it will be valuable. We're giving them a foundation in coding so they can start to see if this thing called Software Technology is where they see their future. If they enjoy it, then they can choose which of the many avenues are open to them to go down. But equally if they come along to our clubs and they start building some cool stuff and scratch and they go, actually I'm not really enjoying this that much. I want to do something else. That's also a valid outcome because they've had the opportunity to try in a structured way, building a programme. They've seen that maybe that's not what excites them. Maybe they're more Excited by sport physical activities or creativity and design, or languages or something else. But they know what coding is, it's about making things happen in a logical way, their structure to it. It's not that the computer doesn't like them. It's just that the computers doing something that they don't, hadn't expected it to do. So it opens that world out. And it's that exposure to technology, the opportunity to engage in technology, that they can then decide where that takes them.

Annie Legge 5:33

Yeah, I think even being able to understand what coding actually is, and the fact that everything that we're using day to day has that fundamentally underneath it is, you know, that's really important, isn't it for whatever whatever career actually path that you take, whether you go into high tech or not.

John Bradford 5:51

Absolutely. And our conversations with industry, following on and over the growth of Digi local, as many of our volunteers work for accounting firms, insurance firms, engineering, civil engineering firms, construction firms, as work in the advanced aerospace and what you might consider high tech with those little inverted quotes around it.

Annie Legge 6:15

Yeah, absolutely. So you talked about young people that particularly don't have access to maybe the mentoring or the opportunity to do this. Can you be a bit more specific around either the age that you target? Or lhow do you find the right people that you know, are going to benefit or enjoy being part of the clubs?

John Bradford 6:35

Absolutely. Well, age is the easiest one, we welcome young people from ages eight years and up. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is around just managing young people and young people's clubs. But also there's a cognitive element where the level of abstraction involved in software gets harder as you get younger age seems to be a tipping point. So eight years and up in terms of who we look to support more widely, we've started to use the phrase marginalised, to act as a broad umbrella term for groups of young people that in the past have been separated from the opportunity to engage in technology.

Girls is a classic example. Many young women these days are still told that technology stuff that's not for you that math stuff that's not for you. And of course, that's nonsense. people of colour are another group that are, broadly speaking, told this technology stuff may not be for you, go and do something else go and get involved in sport. And so we, we aim to work with those groups that are marginalised. I guess the inverse of that would be, you know, middle class white boys from a good background with a father that works in engineering is probably not our target market. They make fantastic volunteers because they understand it, but they're probably not our target market.

The way we find them, is by working closely with partners. So we work very closely with the Bristol Somali Resource Centre. We work very closely with Southmead Development Trust with the venture at Lockleaze playspace, with BS3 community with the library service in South Gloucestershire, and all of our clubs are hyper local. So they are in community venues like the play space, like the library, and most of the young people will walk to the club. So by placing our clubs where those young people live, then we can be reasonably confident without any inward vetting that the young people attending are from those communities and those marginalised groups that we particularly want to encourage.

Annie Legge 8:53

That's amazing. Just working with those partners, particularly. So the young people, maybe just take that example of the starting age of eight, eight year olds, what are they actually learning in a coding club? What are they doing, which I guess differs, you probably have two or three age brackets, I imagine?

John Bradford 9:12

We have an age spread. We don't categorise by age. So they don't graduate from junior to higher. What they do changes as they gain experience with our clubs. And I would say there's there's, there's several levels to the to the learning. At the surface level. They're learning to code. They're learning Scratch and Python, and how to make rocket ships fly through space and play Pong and do all kinds of cool stuff like that. So they are learning code phrases.

At a slightly deeper level, they're beginning to understand computational thinking and how to break a large problem down into smaller logical pieces. And then reassemble those logical pieces to make something complex happen. So if they're making a rocketship fly through space land on an alien planet, that's quite a big complicated thing. But if they learn how to make a sprite move, and then broadcast that it's done that, then something else can listen for that broadcast, changed the background, moved a few other things around, and then do an animation flying through space, and then it can do the animation flying down. So we can split that into three distinct phases, or operations.

So they're starting to learn how to break these complicated things down into smaller functional objects. And alongside that, we start to introduce phrases like objects, functions, methods, loops, iteration, I think we even use the word concatenation somewhere. But quickly expect just means joining two things up something complicated. So they, they're beginning to understand that the computational thinking process, and at a much more fundamental level, they're going through a problem solving cycle. They're figuring out, what do I want this thing to do? How do I go about making it do it? Okay, it's done something that I didn't expect? What did I expect to do? And what's the difference? And how do I get between the two? How do I how do I solve that problem? How do I fix that? And then alongside that, they're also building resilience so that when it doesn't do what they expect, they don't just flip the laptop out the window and run away screaming, they sit down, call me and go, okay, that didn't work. What can I learn from that? How do I make it work.

So that's why at the fundamental level, it's those problem solving skills that they can apply to any computational language, we use Python, and Scratch because they're very easy to get into. But off book, I know several of our young people are playing around with JavaScript. Some of them are learning C sharp, C++. Some are learning other more exotic languages. And that's fantastic. Because they've obviously been bitten by the bug. And that process of going from, how do I make something simple happen? How do I extend it? Okay, that hasn't worked. What did I expect it to do? What's actually done? How do I get between the two, that loop that problem solving loop is is really core to everything that's coming out of our activities?

Annie Legge 12:27

It feels to me, well, it sounds like it's very self directed. So the young people are coming together in the same space, but they've got their own learning journey. Do they do some sort of work in teams, or is it very much a kind of, we're all here together, but we're working in our own separate spaces.

John Bradford 12:48

In the core club activity, it's it's separate spaces. They're all on their own journey. And as I say, we don't have a an age group split. So you, we have some incredible young people aged eight, nine, ten years old, who are working in Python, at quite a sophisticated level. And they have that freedom to do that we're not railroading their path. We do host and encourage external challenges and activities and opportunities where they will come together in teams.

So some of those would be the Raspberry Pi Mission Zero, where a team of young people can come together to write some Python code that will then be squirted up to the International Space Station, run on a hardened Raspberry Pi up there for the astronauts. And then they get a team certificate of where the space station was when their code ran. Another example, would be the NASA Space Apps space coming up NASA Space Apps Challenge where NASA issue a series of global challenges and teams of scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts come together to solve those challenges. That's not a youth event. That's a global Code Jam for anybody interested in science and data. But we bring our young people and say, Okay, this is working at a much higher level than you're perhaps used to, but there's a path into that and we can support you. But as a team, you need to figure out which bit you're doing, which bit your teammates doing, how are you going to bring those bits together? And it's again, it's just a slightly higher level of problem solving in a group. The individual clubs, most folks tend to work quite self directed. Yes.

Annie Legge 14:34

How amazing to connect to coding up to the space station. I'm wondering what happens like a certain age, what's the cutoff age and then what? where might they go once they can't come to one of your clubs anymore?

John Bradford 14:52

We're a youth charity. So under the terms of the Charity Commission, 21 is our oldest. Having said that we don't have anybody that age and our stuff isn't really suitable, if you're over 18, I would say you, you probably should be doing an employment or proper training course not a digital coding club.

What we have seen and when we launched Digilocal back in 2015, we didn't have a clear exit strategy for the young people, it was kind of just the first challenge was to keep them engaged. And we kept them engaged. And some of them have been with us for six years now. They're now 14. And so what we're doing now is putting together a software development team, project delivery team of those 14 year olds, and offering that to industry as a development resource.

So for companies that have a project, that they might go to a software development company and say, Can you do some work on data visualisation or manipulation or some kind of data into in, I'm talking about data lot, because most of our stuff is Python. That could be a project that these young people would work on, and present back to the client, a finished piece of work, not at production code levels, clearly, there are only 14. But we will have industry mentors in as technical directors and code reviewers to make sure what they produce is of a standard, that would be acceptable. And that will give them firstly, team experience. But it will also change the dynamic slightly, because all of our projects are very game focused, very playful. And a lot of them are open to being tweaked or interpreted according to the young person's interest. This would be a brief from a client that says, I want you to build this. And the young people would then have the six weeks of the summer holidays, to convert that into a deliverable project. So this is starting to think about how do we migrate young people from pure fun and enjoyment to fun and enjoyment. But with a bit more of an employment pathway coming into that to say, this could also be a career for you, as well as something fun to do want to choose evening.

Annie Legge 17:21

That, John is amazing. Absolutely amazing to think that actually, companies can engage a group of 14 year olds. But you know, it benefits both sides? You know, I can see that's absolutely amazing. So that type of project, and obviously the clubs themselves, I understand they're primarily run by volunteers. Can you just sort of talk a little bit about like, how do you become a volunteer? What sort of person? And is it more than one person that's involved in leading these clubs? How does it practically work?

John Bradford 17:55

The starting point is always the community venue. And we work quite hard with our community partners to find venues, where those young people are. Once we have a community venue together, then we start to recruit volunteers to support each venue. We need at least two volunteers for each venue for our safeguarding policy. So volunteers are always working in pairs, they're never on their own with the young person, they're never running a club on their own. They should always have that second person as backup, the individuals then those volunteers generally come from some technical background. But most actually don't work as software developers with the inverted quotes. Again, we have engineers, we have some scientists, we have some, again, business people, but with perhaps some coding background or some web development background, there are people that can get into engineering problem solving process, but not necessarily 14 years experience of C++, the young people are following project guides for the most part.

At the simplest level, the problem solving can be make your code look like the guide, and it will work. That's not very useful. What tends to be more useful is for the volunteer to sit alongside the young, personal Crashdown alongside the in person so they will level and get that young person to go through the problem solving process sort of explained to me, what's your code actually doing? Okay, now describe what it should do. Okay, so how are we going to get between the two, and then either with the blocks in Scratch or with the code available in Python, start to come up with a solution. It may not match the solution in the guide. And that's fine because there's multiple ways of solving the same problem in code. It's one of the great things about software, but as long as the code does what it should do Do then you can compare it and say, Okay, well, we solved it this way the guides got this code, both are valid, yours will work carry on building your project from there. So they need to be people that are quite patient, there needs to be people that are very willing to let others make mistakes and support that learning process, because the other thing that can be quite challenging is to watch a young person halfway through typing in line of code, you know, isn't going to work, but they need to write it in and run the programme to see the error, to then figure out why it doesn't work. And as long as they don't go too far down that rabbit hole, then realising that oh, they've they've missed out or they've used the wrong variable, or their indentation is slightly wrong so instead of it going around the loop all the time, actually, it's not in the loop.

Giving them the space to do that is really powerful learning. That's how generally we learn from our mistakes. So our volunteers need that patience to let the young people go do their thing. But then be approachable to say, Okay, well, how do we make that better? What's, what's the right solution? Not to jump in and go, This is how you do it. Because again, young people don't learn that way. You need to coach them, mentor them through, we talk about mentoring a lot, mentor the young person through the way that either the guide does it? Or how, if the volunteers familiar with that language, they can come up with their own solution. Okay, well, this is how so I would do it. And that's brilliant, because then the young person gets to see a real engineer solving a problem, perhaps for the first time. So how do we solve this, okay? So if you enjoy that kind of mentoring, supporting people come on, you've got a bit of an engineering background or interest. And you've got an hour a week, then potentially be a fantastic volunteer.

Annie Legge 21:53

How many people generally, what's the average number of people in each club?

John Bradford 21:57

Each club is up to 10 young people. So we have two packs, with five laptops in each pack that go around the clubs. So the volunteers will unpack the laptops, plug them all in, we pop the laptops up, get them all signed into the laptop, the young people then have their own unique Google workspace accounts. So they'll sign into their Google workspace, download their saved work from the last session, open up the project guide, start working away, volunteers can then wander around the outside of the young people.

We try and cluster them in the middle, I'm waving my hands on a podcast that's gonna go down well, the young people, we try and sit them in a ring, so the volunteers will go on the outside. And then as young people get stuck, and either put their hand up or ask or are just sort of sitting there staring at the screen a bit confused, then the volunteers can can sort of step forward and get the young person to open up and say, you know, what's happening? Is it behaving as you expect it? Is it misbehaving? How do we help solve that, and then at the end of each session only saves their work, upload it back to Google Sign out or Google workspace pack everything away, we then come to the local, we then come and pick the laptops up and move them to the next venue. The volunteers will be two volunteers to about 10 young people. And their their engagement is in that one hour with the young people, helping them learn helping them grow and develop all the admin, all the administration, the back end stuff. That's the stuff that the charity does, so that the volunteers can focus on the young people.

Annie Legge 23:35

And you were talking about the laptops, it's obviously a very, very well executed process to get these clubs running. And you also do laptop repurposing, is that right?

John Bradford 23:45

We do. Yes. So when COVID hit, we obviously we stopped all of our in person clubs overnight. And we launched an online club format. So we also have online sessions, but recognising the the young people in the communities we're supporting many of them didn't have access at home to online educational resources. So we gifted out our 30 Club laptops to young people that were attending the clubs to support their online education. And somebody found out about that and said, Oh, I've got a laptop. Could you sort out give it to the data and give it to young person in need. And yeah, okay, we can do that.

We've now done that for about 2000 laptops and continue to do that for we're running at probably about 100 A month or slightly less. It fluctuates slightly, sometimes it goes down sometimes it goes up. We've got an arrangement with a even Fire and Rescue Service. there permanently stationed fire stations and the communities are accepting donated laptops on our behalf. Any working Windows laptop with a webcam and a power cable, we can accept in, do a full three pass data wipe and over wipe to destroy the hard disk. We then instal Ubuntu Linux onto that, along with a few packages like zoom and chrome, set that up with an admin account and user account, and then issue that with a new ownership document that gives the receiving person access to the laptop, they go out through our extended network of community partners. So we don't do the vetting of who gets laptop, who doesn't. It's the anchor community organisations that are working with these families on a daily basis. know who the ones are in need know who will benefit know who's engaging with educational services, but just needs a bit of extra resource support. And those laptops then go out through that system.

Annie Legge 25:52

That is a big well run processes that you have there, and lots that you're doing. How would you describe the impact that you have with Digilocal? How do you measure it, I guess, and what do you need in terms of sort of scaling what you do if that's your ambition?

John Bradford 26:14

I think I mean, with most charities, that the scaling question is always we want to grow and do more, until the issue that would set up challenge has gone away. So when there are no young people that are lacking the opportunities to access this technology stuff, then there's no need for Digilocal, and we'll shut up shop and go home. That hasn't happened and is unlikely to happen in the near future. So yes, we would like to grow and develop. The simplest measure of impact is attendance.

As I mentioned, a lot of our young people have been attending for over six months, and several have been attending for six years or more. So something's going on there. They're enjoying what we do. Regardless of any other evaluation they're attending, they're coming back. They're, they're liking it, we do have young people that come along, and clearly don't enjoy it. And then we can have the conversation with the parents to say, you know, young person, fantastic, lovely, lovely kid, nope, they're really great. They're just not enjoying this. And you can't make someone have fun. So if they're not having fun, they're not going to learn, they're not going to benefit. Fine, let's find something else for them to do find another club for them, and will offer their place to another person on the waiting list.

In terms of formal evaluation, at the end of each project, we ask the young people to fill out a very short eight question feedback form. And for those questions are broadly about their confidence in their ability to complete the project. And the other for on the support and encouragement they had from the volunteers. And so what we can do then is look at a young person's profile. These are all submitted on Google Forms, and we hash the emails. So we've got a unique identifier that's not traceable back to the individual. But what we can then do is track an individual / young person over 5,6,20 projects, and see how their confidence varies as they tackle new and more challenging topics, how the support they get from the volunteer, drops away as they're getting more confident, and then comes back up again, when their confidence takes a dive and all that kind of stuff.

We're starting to come up with profiles of young people's journey through our content. And there's a couple of sort of templates that have come out. And one is the aha moment when they suddenly realise that they can do this, and there's a huge spike in confidence. The other one is the more gentle plateau. Confidence remaining high, but they're taking on more challenging projects. So if they weren't learning, growing and developing, you would expect their confidence to dip off as things got harder, and they came up against bigger challenges. But it stays high. So they're, they're growing and developing in a positive way. That's fantastic. And then the other profile we see is when they migrate from scratch to Python, and they go from a very visual block based environment into a much more challenging written environment, Python, and they don't have everything available. And there's there's a lot more options to them. And then we can quite often see a dip or they're less confident in what they're doing. They're not sure they've achieved what they could do. The volunteer support often goes up at that point as well. And then hopefully, we see that confidence come back as they again, learn more about Python gain a bit more skill, and off they go. So that's our evaluation will be beginning to look at social economic background that's very challenging for a number of reasons around ethics and data. So for the moment, our main evaluation is, are those confidence reports and attendance?

Annie Legge 30:14

And what do you need most in order to do more of what you're doing

John Bradford 30:23

Volunteers. In all honesty, volunteers are our largest constraints. If we had another eight to 10 volunteers, we could launch another three to four clubs. Almost overnight, we've got very good relationships with a few communities where we don't have clubs, we've got some very good relationships with communities where we have had clubs, but volunteers, work has changed, they've moved on, they've moved out of area, whatever, those clubs have had to fold, or be paused, so we can relaunch them very quickly.

So volunteers is always my key ask from any community group, when I'm talking to companies, if they have people that are interested in volunteering in the evenings, we'd love to have them on board. That's our biggest constraint. Cash is always an issue. We're a fairly lean organisation, there's only two members of staff myself and yes, main. But we need to be employed, we need to buy groceries and food and pay rent and stuff. So you know, there is a core cost associated with running the club. But the individual clubs themselves are, are very low cost. It's usually the rental higher fees of the venues, which we like to pay, because that helps to support those community partners we're working with.

Annie Legge 31:46

Of course, and do you run any clubs in Bath or are they mainly Bristol based? And I think you said South Gloucestershire?

John Bradford 31:54

We haven't yet. Again, if we have volunteers interested, I know communities and community organisations and organisations over there that would love to host it's partly it's capacity of of me, traipsing around making these connections. But ultimately, it comes down to those volunteers.

Annie Legge 32:15

So a big call out quite clearly there for any more volunteers, obviously, in Bristol, but actually, we'd love to see I'm based in Bath, I'd love to see, some of these clubs happen more locally as well. So if anyone's interested, then definitely get in touch with John. And this is just such a good Tech for Good example, in every possible way in terms of what you're practically doing with the clubs, but also the repurposing of the laptops. This is so much more than just learning code, as you spoke very eloquently to, it's also about the other benefits that will be skills that don't get taken away and can be applied to any job. And I can clearly see even the social aspect and the benefit of coming together in community venues with other members of the community.

A final question for you, John, what does Tech for Good mean to you. Particularly what your hopes and aspirations are more more broadly for the Bristol region?

John Bradford 33:15

I guess, at the end of the day, Tech for Good for me is leaving things in a better way than you found them. And, and that can apply for envirotec, coding tech, social, whatever, it's leaving things in a better way than you found them. I hope that what we do with DigiLocal, means that the communities we're supporting and working with are left in a better state, they're more resilient, they've got more internal capacity and capability for economic growth than when we started DigiLocal 8 to 10 years ago. I suppose my ultimate vision would be that in some period of time in the future, I'd want to set a date on it, then any young person in the Bristol or Bath greater region would have the opportunity to discover their digital talents and develop them in whichever direction they choose.

Annie Legge 34:10

I love that. So how do people get in touch with you, John, because clearly we're gonna get lots more volunteers. Because, you know, I think it's, you can't deny what impact that these these clubs have. But also the continuing importance of them, you know, this isn't something that's going away, as you said as well, and how best to get in touch with you?

John Bradford 34:31

So the best way is by email. There's a couple of forms on our website and I'm sure the website will be linked in the description. Or what we need from volunteers are an hour of your time in the evening. Our clubs generally run between six and seven o'clock in the evening. So it's after working hours. They will require an enhanced DBS but we can help with that through STEM learning the STEM AMBASSADOR programme can provide you with a free and high Let's DBS were working volunteering with young people. The clubs run throughout the year. So they include some holiday periods, which is the other reason for having three or four volunteers supporting clubs that folks can take holidays, we recognise that.

In exchange, volunteers will get the warm glowing feeling of supporting others. But actually, there are tangible benefits for volunteers, you're gaining skills in managing teams, talking to people, all those softer skills that are particularly important for leadership roles. You're developing your own mentoring and teaching skills, which are quite often important for leading teams. If you haven't used Python before, it's a great way to learn Python. Teaching an eight year old is a great way to learn Python, I can tell you that as a mechanical engineer who's self taught, it's, it's amazing for that. And we're very keen also for volunteers to offer their own project guides for the young people. So we have half a dozen project guides now written by volunteers on topics that are of interest to them. And that's another great way of practising your art as an engineer, software developer, team leader to explain the process for somebody else of going through building something cool in code.

Annie Legge 36:24

I love that. Thank you so much, John, you're doing so much and you've been doing it for a long time as well. So I can really get a sense of a very well executed process to have these clubs running as they do. And hopefully we can get some more volunteers and open some more clubs as well.

Thank you so much for your time and sharing your journey with us.

John Bradford 36:44

Tthank you again for the invitation. It's been wonderful to talk about my favourite subject.

Annie Legge 36:49

Thank you, John.