Get hands-on with tech at tinkering workshops

Residents are being encouraged to discover the fun of gaming, gadgets and wireless tech wizardry as part of The Village at Wellard Residents Association’s monthly tech tinkering workshops.

Held at the John Wellard Community Centre on the first Saturday of each month, the workshops will introduce attendees to new technologies, coding and tinkering with hardware for robotics, 3-D printing, computer vision, machine learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, drones and blockchain.

Tech Tinkering co-ordinator Sebastian Malcolm said the idea behind the workshop was to connect like-minded Wellard residents and to provide easy and fun access to new technologies.

He said free or inexpensive science, technology, engineering and maths education often created opportunities for innovative ideas to flourish and inspired youth to engineer a better future for themselves, communities, societies and the environment.

“Perth has an amazing depth and breadth of technical talent that can create new local employment opportunities when people are given time and space to collaborate,” he said.

“Imagining the potential innovation from new employment opportunities with technology is far easier when families, students and businesses enjoy hands-on play with hardware or collaborate on coding apps and websites.”

Hosted by members of Perth Machine Learning Group and the Internet of Things community, the event is free to attend, though a gold coin donation will be required to secure a place in the queue for the virtual reality headset. Children must be accompanied by an adult and supervised while wearing a VR or augmented reality headset.

Residents are encouraged to bring their own laptops if they want to learn about coding.

The next Tech Tinkering event will be held from noon-3pm on Saturday.