​Back in April 2020, the Scientific Computing Department's (SCD) Public Engagement teams across the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) and the Daresbury Laboratory (DL), decided to put their entire Summer Work Experience 2020 programme online. This was no small feat. DL had almost 250 applications, and RAL had arranged places for over 140 students!

Throughout May and August, 13 work experience sessions took place via a Zoom webinar package, which was not only made available to all RAL and DL applicants, but also to those at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. In total, they reached 1000 young people!

An important part of the Summer Work Experience programme onsite was a series of interactive 'Introduction to Python' workshops. This year the course material was adapted and delivered online by SCD staff, using Jupyter Notebooks.

In feedback, the students gave the workshop 4.6 out of 5, and 90% said that they had learnt something new.

One student stated, “This was super enjoyable and approachable! I have always wanted to start learning Python but never knew how. A lot of coding work experience or workshops are aimed at people who know basic coding, so the fact that this one was aimed at beginners was really appreciated."

As well as the coding workshops, a virtual tour of the SCD Data Centre was included. This was created and ran by SCD's own Jacob ward, who originally began as a Scientific Computing Graduate and spoke about the exciting scientific research SCD is involved in.
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