Every time school holidays roll around, parents across the city are left wondering how to entertain their kids, a task made even more difficult if your kids aren't interested in sport or the beach and want to stay home playing Minecraft.
Don't worry—the team at Venture Centre has come to the rescue — creating MADVentures.
Find the MADVentures Facebook page and you'll have easy access to a collation of the activities designed to keep creative, inventive, tech interested kids and teens occupied and challenged throughout the year.
Venture Centre co-founder Jo Allum says it's all about ensuring that the next generation are just as enabled with digital tools and services — the skills to use them and knowledge of how to apply them to create value — as small businesses and other organisations.
"At Venture Centre we believe in learning through doing. So if the young members of your family are great inventors, always coming up with bright ideas, we can teach them how to test those ideas in the same way any start up or entrepreneur would," she says.
"More and more, we as a society realise we don't know what the future of jobs is going to look like for our kids. The labour market is no longer something that can be managed by government and institutions.
The future is uncertain and the variety of attributes and competencies needed to thrive in it are multitudinous. So at Venture Centre we focus on learning of transferable skills — like coding, or validation, team work or how to pitch ideas, concepts or plans to secure resources. MADVentures brings together all the things we've been offering for a while, including Mashup, Codebrite and Young Enterprise, into one place for your kids and teens so they will be the ones that thrive."
First up for 2018 are their popular Codebrite events — computational skills for eight to 13 year olds — which will be held on January 22 and 23 at Basestation, on Durham St.
There is also a learn to code taster course held in Katikati at 1pm on January 25.
For more information, check out MADVentures on Facebook or sign up to Venture Centre's mailing list at www.venturecentre.co.nz