Meet the Mentors – Meet Carole 21st March, 2016 Carole is a web developer, a long-time CoderDojo mentor at a number of Dojos across Scotland and an advocate for increasing the number of girls and women in coding. Here she tells us about her top tips for young coders, her favourite programming language (or not!) and how she couldn't live without the wonder that is the World Wide Web. What’s the best thing about being a CoderDojo mentor? "I enjoy helping others to learn new skills and always thought about being a teacher when I was at school. This way I get to enjoy my career in something I enjoy: coding, but also get to teach in my free time. The best thing about being a mentor at Coder Dojo is seeing someone who starts off not knowing what they are doing and leaving full of confidence with that I made something awesome look on their face." What age were you when you started coding? "I am not sure really, whenever it was first taught in high school, so I was maybe about 14. I always liked computers and was forever playing on our home PC so computing was an obvious choice for standard grades and highers at school." How did you get into it in the first place? "In standard grade computing at high school. I'm not one of these people who have been coding in my own personal projects since I was really young. I was pretty good at it at school because it was all about logic and following rules (an algorithm) but I just liked computing in general at that point. I didn't know I wanted to be a programmer until about half way through university!" What awesome tip do you have for young coders? "Don't be scared. To try things, to break things, to ask for help. No one gets everything right first time, even if they pretend like they do!" What’s your favourite programming language (and why!)? "I don't think I have a particular favourite, I just like using whatever is best for the scenario. If you pick a cool idea for what you want to make then make other choices like programming language or framework from there. Being a programmer, you can't get too attached to one particular language, it may be obsolete soon!" What do you like about coding? "I like making stuff. Seeing your code come to life and make your project work is great fun. That "It works!!" moment after running your code makes the challenging parts worth it." What’s the one tech you couldn’t live without? "Probably the World Wide Web (WWW). Without this I couldn't use my smartphone or PC for all the browsing/streaming/tracking/communicating I do all day… or most importantly, I wouldn't have a job!" And the one you wish you’d invented? "The WWW. Life literally wouldn't be the same without it. In just a short amount of time it has become such an important part of our lives. It must be pretty cool being Sir Tim Berners-Lee getting to see how much he has impacted the world." Sir Tim Berners-Lee If you were a super-hero, who would you be? "Being Iron man seems like it would be good fun: all the money in the world to buy and make cool tech. " To find out more about why Carole thinks coding is such a 'must have' skill read her guest post on the Ayrshire College blog. If you're interested in volunteering to mentor at CoderDojo, great! Get in touch here.