The second-hand machines were due to be recycled but now have a new lease of life helping Edinburgh’s young people learn programming. The School has donated 35 laptops to Prewired, a free-to-attend after-school programming club for young people in Edinburgh.Prewired provides a supportive space on Wednesday nights, almost every week of the year, where young people can work on projects of their own choosing. They support absolute beginners who are just starting out in Scratch, to advanced learners who are exploring electronics or low-level code.Rayo Verweij, who is the acting Chair of Prewired (and also a PhD student on the CDT Designing Responsible NLP at the School of Informatics), says, “This donation of laptops is huge for us! While we've had some laptops available for attendees to use, they were very old and quite literally starting to fall apart. A donation of this size means we are able to replace our entire fleet and keep Prewired accessible to those who do not have their own equipment to work with. In addition, they're a lot more powerful than what we used to have, opening up a lot of new potential projects such as basic 3D modelling or running small language models”.Thanks to Rosie Wilkie, who is a trustee of the charity, for requesting the laptops to be donated. Rosie says, “I’m very grateful that this donation was all made possible by our amazing IT team who identified suitable machines, prepared them for the donation and helped me to load these for delivery to CodeBase where the weekly Prewired sessions are held.” Learn more about volunteering for Prewired:We’re always looking for more mentors! | Prewired Tags Outreach Sustainability Publication date 05 May, 2026
