At first we played a few ice breaker games to get to know each other and our trainers who would be teaching and supporting us over the course of the week which was a lot of fun. Everyone was very friendly and engaged in all the activities. Next we were taught the basics of HTML and a little bit of CSS in order to develop a website template to ease into our course. This gave us the knowledge to start our first basic website which was very helpful for our project as we became very confident in using HTML. We learned how to add a title, text and images on our first websites. Also the little bit of CSS we had learned showed us how to change the font, colour of the text and many more fun things. There were many girls from different skill levels so if at any time we were stuck we could also ask any one of the girls who had experience which made it more engaging. All the trainers where very helpful and solved any problems we had. They were very easy to talk to and it didn’t feel scared to ask anything. Closer to the end of the first day we received a tour around the Vodafone Headquarters showcasing the real reality of the daily lives of the workers at Vodafone which was very inspiring to say the least.

On Day 2, we learnt more about CSS and UX and UI. CSS by now seemed fairly straightforward as the trainers where very through in their explanation and made it very easy for all of the girls to understand no matter your skill level. You write some CSS, tweak it here and there until it looks the way you want, and you’re done! In theory that is exactly how CSS is meant to work and why it is brilliant because it is very simple to use when you get a grasp on it.

As designs get more and more complex, for larger and larger sites - you will need to write more and more CSS code. For simple designs like navbar, tables and modals, lots of other people will have written CSS to create them on their website, so it is counter-productive for everyone to write their own version. About 5 years ago, ‘all’ you would have had to worry about is the cross-browser display issues. Since then, the mobile web has exploded and you have another. We also had another ice breaker game which was great fun as now we were more comfortable with each other and even created our own Spotify playlist to play in the background while we worked on our website.

On Day 3, From the innovation centre a woman named Marta came and informed us about her job on the innovation team and what she gets up to day by day . This motivated and inspired a lot of us to pursue a job like Marta’s as it seemed very rewarding and there proved to be a new challenge every day for her; which is necessary as the human mind needs to be constantly stimulated and that’s exactly what jobs like Marta’s provide. We have met the robot Pepper. Pepper is a product of artificial intelligence that was created in order to support Vodafone. We interacted with Pepper for quite a while and watched her dance laugh and pose for various pictures for us all. Then we were informed about what we have to do for our project. We also learned how to use Github which is a way for developers to post their code while working together in a team and how to merge code together. This was very confusing at first but our trainers explained it well and we finally understood how to use it. Our trainers informed us that we had to get into groups of 2-4. First we had to come up with what our website was about and then think about our targeted audience and how we want to portray our information in a visually appealing way.

We were later judged by various people taking on different yet very importing roles in Vodafone from AI to HR and front end developers. Finally one by one we presented our websites which was very interesting to see the other girls’ websites as we hadn’t seen their work for the last 2 days. It was interesting to see their theme and their layout which where all completely different. After all of the teams presented their websites about each of their chosen ideas we all received certificates and the winning team was announced.