NEWI helps scouts be prepared for IT

Last night a group of Holywell Cubs and Scouts visited NEWI’s engineering facilities to complete their information technology badges.

Holywell Cub Scout Leader Andrew Byrne contacted NEWI to see if the institute would be able to provide one of their information technology laboratories for an evening for the Scouts and Cubs to use to obtain their badges. NEWI’s engineering department kindly agreed and arranged the evening and on-hand tutoring. As part of the visit and as a little break from the screens the scouts and cubs were also given a demonstration of NEWI’s Rapid Prototyping machine. This is a new piece of equipment that allows items to be produced quickly from either a computer-aided design drawing or by scanning an actual object to reproduce.

The group were completing badges at two different levels. Stage one involved learning how to switch on and close down a computer, learning about different aspects of computing equipment; using software to create a poster featuring text and graphics and producing a picture using painting software and using a CD-ROM. Some of the Scouts were advancing to stage two which involved producing a list of rules for using the Internet safely; learning about more advanced pieces of software and hardware; saving a file and opening it again; using the Internet for researching a topic; creating some event stationery; producing a newsletter and some basic graphs.

David Morris from Clwyd Scouts said, “We’re very grateful to NEWI for helping the Cubs and Scouts of Holywell to gain their IT badges. Some people are surprised that Scouts badges cover such things as computing, skateboarding and public relations but in an ever changing world we’d be wrong to concentrate on campfires and map reading alone.”

For the last few years the information technology badges have been sponsored by the British Computer Society (BSC), the professional Institute for the IT industry, as part of their initiative to raise the profile and competency levels of IT amongst young people.