Volunteering at Do Space

In my seven months of volunteering I’ve had the opportunity to experience and learn so many things. I have developed my people skills, as well as my technical skills. For me, I don’t really see my time at DoSpace as volunteering, I see it as a learning experience and a way for me to get out of the house and do something I enjoy. Plus, you get to be around some awesome tech! But it’s not just the technology that I love, the most rewarding part of being a volunteer at DoSpace is being able to sit down and talk with some of the people who come in. I have learned so much just by talking to people who come in, and has continued to fuel my passion for technology.

In addition to volunteering, I also mentor in web design. I usually meet with other youth looking to start learning web design, for about an hour during at an arranged meeting. I always love it when parents attend the lesson since the get to learn the subject matter as well and can help their children outside of the lessons which is always great to see. It’s the most rewarding thing to see someone understanding how the code works and being able modify it and even write it from scratch because from there, their imagination is the limit; all they have to do is acquire the knowledge and apply it.

Although web design is debatably most straightforward of any programing, it’s also one of the more challenging fields in programming at the same time, since you usually learn three different programming languages such as: HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) the framework of all websites, JavaScript which makes websites interactive with buttons and advanced animations, and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which makes everything look pretty! The difficulty with web design especially with youth, is that all the languages are coded differently and have their own set of rules, but when everything clicks it can be a lot of fun and they have a lot of creative freedom. I always love seeing what my mentees make after attending our meetings.