Cym was introduced to the world of programming in 1984, when she was 10 years old. She still remembers the magic of creating her first computer program. In her computer workshops she aims to introduce the workshop participants to this same magic of creating your own computer projects.
Cym has been traveling around Europe for many years, teaching HTML to many different people in many different countries. In 2009 she returned to The Netherlands where she finished her studies Interaction Design & Unstable Media, followed by several new studies focusing on Arts & Education and Education in general.
Currently she is running her own creative maker space in The Netherlands, where children aged 8 to 16 are coming every week to explore the many possibilities of working with the computer.
Cym is one of the leading teachers for The Netherlands during Codeweek.
Especially in the beginning Cym often tried to make a connection between Net & Nature in her workshops. She would take the workshop participants outside of the building and explore the surroundings together with them. They would take photos and collect impressions and use these materials to create a website.
In the year 2006 she started to create objects from trash and soon enough she also started doing workshops creating objects from trash. In these workshops she used mostly packaging material from the super market. She showed the workshop participants how you can make a small wallet from an empty milk carton. After some years, when people started paying less and less with coins and paper money, the need for wallets also disappeared and her workshop recycling slowly turned into workshops working with robotics.
Simultenously to doing the recycling workshops Cym always continued to do workshops HTML/Webdesign. From 2012 on she started to do regular workshops with children. First the recycling workshops, then also workshops HTML. At first the children were 11 and 12 years old. When she was asked to do a workshop HTML for children aged 8 and 9 she started looking for different possibilities and found Scratch.
From 2015 on her workshops became more and more focused especially on teaching Scratch and showing children how they can create their own computer games.
The children in her workshops kept coming and after a while they wanted to learn more, not just Scratch, so her workshops for children nowadays also include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Unity, Blender, Processing, Bash and more. During the lessons they play with B-Bots, mBots, Ozobots, MakeyMakeys, Micro:bits, Arduino and more.
In 2020 the lessons moved to the online space. For around two years the lessons were via Discord and Zoom, which created new and different possibilities. It was also during this time that Cym started to create instruction videos which she put on her YouTube channel.
Nowadays Cym is working as a teacher for computer science on a secondary school in Utrecht and still has her small Maker Space in Woerden. Recently she also started to do courses for digital literacy with adults, especially for adults that have moved to the Netherlands from other countries and have very little experience in working with computers.
Since 2022 she is also teaching Dutch as a second language. She especially enjoys teaching Dutch as a second language in combination with teaching basic computer skills. And there are many people who need such a course…