Last Tuesday, our Paisley Computing Department welcomed 15 pupils from Johnstone High School as part of their Skills & Employability programme, in partnership with the Renfrewshire Council in the context of their STEM initiative.

The S3 and S4 pupils took part in a full-day practical workshop to get a grasp of mobile games development using TouchDevelop. This tool, developed at Microsoft Research, enables users to easily create application for mobile devices, and is also a very didactic tool to teach programming and mobile device technology.

The schoolchildren were thrilled to have this opportunity to gain practical experience in app development. One of them said:

I really enjoyed my day at the College. I learned a lot about games and the world behind it.  It has helped me with what I want to do in my life but altogether my experience was amazing.

John McGivens, PT Computing and Business Education at Johnston High School, sees great value in this day spent at the College for the pupils: "A well run day with interesting statistics on Scotland’s place in the ‘Tech’ industry, some really useful and fun way to use software and an app in an afternoon.  Really enjoyable and useful.”

David Renton, Paisley CQL for Computing at West College Scotland, supervised the workshop. He was impressed by the creativity of the kids and hopes this taster will incite them to join our Games Development courses at the College. He says: “All the schoolchildren managed to create their own version of the popular Flappy Birds mobile game. We went through the whole process of creating some basic art and animation and then coded the game.

The students really seemed to enjoy it and hopefully it opened their eyes to a potential career in programming, a skill which is in high demand in Scotland right now.