With LEGO, Calliope, and Ozobot, students gain their first programming experience at AMCON.
At this year’s Future Career Day at AMCON, 19 students got a glimpse into the daily life of a software company. With the help of LEGO Mindstorms, Ozobot, and Calliope, the young aspiring developers were able to gain their first programming experience.
Nineteen children aged between 11 and 16 chose to spend today’s Future Career Day at AMCON to gain insight into software development. The team around Jens Kuster, Michael Chojetzki, Can Sasmaz, and David Ferneding came up with something very special to introduce the 19 students to software development. For this purpose, the children and teenagers were divided into four groups, each exploring programming in different ways. “Future Day is a great opportunity every year to connect young people with the topic of software development and inspire them to get excited about programming. We are, of course, very pleased with the strong participation this year, and we have significantly expanded our methods compared to last time,” says Olaf Clausen, Managing Director of AMCON.
The children were divided into small groups and playfully introduced to programming using different methods. At the first station, the children built LEGO Mindstorms robots that, by the end of the morning, could follow a predetermined path and stop at different colors. The second station focused on the microcomputer Calliope. Here, the aspiring developers learned the basic functions and were even able to develop a remote control for vehicles by the end. At the third station, the small robot Ozobot navigated through a maze using color codes. In between, the kids were given tours of the AMCON offices so they could get an impression of what the professional software developers work on daily. After 45 minutes at each station, the children rotated to the next one to try out all the methods. The morning ended with lunch and a junior programming diploma for everyone.
The Lower Saxony Future Career Day is designed to support career orientation and aims to break down gender-specific career choices. That’s why the AMCON team was especially pleased that, alongside fifteen boys, four girls from Cloppenburg and Oldenburg were our guests to learn more about the profession of software developer.