South East Success - Tech Resort CIC

The RSA regionally-funded start-up venture Tech Resort CIC kicked off earlier this year. Three of the Directors behind this great idea are RSA Fellows Will Callaghan, Shane Mitchell & Mark Hadley, and they are supported by an impressive local team of talented individuals.

Tech Resort provides a new digital talent development programme for 8-18 year olds in Eastbourne and the surrounding area. It will ultimately have many work streams and so all support and seed funding from the RSA is greatly welcomed.

Tech Resort is about to start an audit of local and national digital skills needed to inform a larger scale programme for Eastbourne schools and colleges.

Projects already up and running include ‘TechResort Teens’, a new fortnightly coding club designed to teach youngsters programming skills. The club is led by Dr Aidan Delaney and Donna Comerford with help from local enthusiastic coders, designers and artists. They will also be inviting experts from around the country and any other RSA Fellows with coding skills who would like to help.

The new computer science curriculum starting in September 2014 for both primary and secondary schools, means teachers will need to encourage their students to use their computer programming skills for creative ends. Tech Resort is leading with a half day computing training course for teachers to achieve two goals: firstly, to develop their technical skills in programming; and secondly, to give them some insight into the requirements in the new computer science curriculum whilst helping their donor schools with a half day supply cover and computing training. This is a joint project between the Artswork-funded Creative Computing project, Tech Resort and the Computing School at the University of Brighton.

Tech Resort also has its first mentee, 15 year old Theo, who chose to build an Android app to show great Eastbourne events on TVs around the town. Theo has been going great guns since March, which saw the first public beta testing of his work.

Any Fellows interested in helping or finding out more should contact Tech Resort

Mark Hadley, South East Fellowship Councillor

RSA South East offered start-up funding to Tech Resort CIC. Find out more about how you can apply.