Our year 11 Mechatronics learners welcomed Joe of Tinker Studios for a virtual masterclass exploring programming languages and electronic systems. 
 
During their coursework, our mechatronics learners encountered difficulty using object oriented programming rather than synchronous sequences programming. To help the learners overcome this obstacle, teacher Heman drafted in coding expert and industry leader Joe to help learners better understand the milli () function and work on text-based coding.   
 
Joe Founded Tinker Studios in 2019 with the aim of getting young people into tech, making his experience as a creative technologist the perfect aid for our learners. 
 
He introduced the session by talking about careers in the tech industry, whilst also touching upon the intersection between creativity and technology that can often be overlooked when seeking out careers. 
 
Learners then moved onto exercises, in collaboration with our visitor, to practise using the milli () function. Joe set out various exercises for learners to help develop this coding skill and learners even volunteered to demonstrate it to the rest of the class. It was truly a feat of collaboration! 
 
“It was brilliant to see learners of different abilities give text-based coding a go, as it’s not an easy skill to master. Within the brief, we have noticed block-based coding does cause issues as it does not have enough functions to perform simultaneous operations. Learners are required to therefore learn code to edit and understand these further functions. Within the curriculum, it is required for learners to understand the types of programming languages, systems and their main features and how to produce microcontroller programs that perform different functions through a programming language; in this case C++. It was great to see how far the learners are upskilling their coding understanding as the task Joe asked of them is of a high ability for GCSE students. This in turn will support their understanding in their coursework,” Heman, teacher of Mechatronics. 
 
Reflecting on the session, learner Zainab shared, “It was helpful having Joe lead us through coding exercises. It was also really fun because we were able to apply our coding skills to a realistic scenario. I feel a lot more confident with my coursework thanks to Joe!”  
 
Thank you Joe, for lending our learners your expertise and industry insight as well as fostering an exciting learning environment. Emboldened with this masterclass, our learners will no doubt overcome this obstacle in their coursework.