Students from all over the world got a taste of higher education and computer programming at the School of Computing on Wednesday 27 March.
The group of students from Pestalozzi International Village Trust, based in East Sussex, visited the Canterbury Campus of the University of Kent. The group represented seven different nationalities from countries including Belize, Nepal and Uganda. The students are in the UK to study the International Baccalaureate, before going on to further study and then returning to their home countries where their education can make a positive contribution.
Student Programme Worker Sarah Kadri said; “All of the students are selected to come to the UK because they are academically talented, from disadvantaged backgrounds and wish to make a positive difference to their home communities.”
Daniel Knox and Michael Berry, two postgraduate research students from the School of Computing, showed the students how to create a simple computer game using Greenfoot. Greenfoot is an educational piece of software, designed to make learning the JAVA programming language easy and fun. Both students said: “It’s great to see students in this age group interacting and engaging with a real-world programming language; especially when they may not have otherwise had this opportunity.”
Kent’s outreach team organised the visit and the students also got a taste what studying biosciences and social sciences would be like.