EU Code Week and Girls Go Coding
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
3 likes•616 views
Why and how to attract kids to coding. A few pointers and ideas to use in schools and co-working spaces (see notes).
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
EU Code Week and Girls Go Coding
- 1. Coding in the classroom From Angry Birds to computer code Kostas Karpouzis ICCS-NTUA kkarpou@cs.ntua.gr fb/tw/g+/skype: kkarpou
- 2. Coding is the new ‘black’ useful to attract boys to school curriculum ‘safe’ for tech-savvy girls may be used across disciplines (e.g. Phun for physics)
- 3. Low on tech? That’s OK! Unplugged activities
- 4. EU Code week year Hour of Code Girls go coding - GR
- 5. EU Code week year http://codeweek.eu Hour of Code http://code.org Girls go coding - GR http://openscience.gr/girls-go-coding
- 6. “Coding is the closest thing we have to a superpower” Drew Houston, creator of DropBox Kostas Karpouzis kkarpou@cs.ntua.gr fb/tw/g+/skype: kkarpou
Editor's Notes
- Most people consider coding as an introduction to teaching problem solving or, as CS (computer science) people call it, ‘algorithmic thinking’. And that’s true, considering that most CS courses start off with Scratch and go on with Lego robots and try to break down complex spatial reasoning problems to smaller ones. But take a moment to think about this: boys usually define themselves as being close to technology and applied subjects. If conventional teaching is restrained to the existing paper-based paradigms, it becomes increasingly difficult to motivate them. Coding can come to the rescue here for those boys, as well as for girls who feel empowered enough and want to keep away from the traditional clichés of theoretical studies. You may have seen a viral video from a couple of months ago, showing a little girl that wants to play in the school yard, but her parents instruct her to keep away so that she won’t stain her neat clothes. The following shot shows her in science class, where a male classmate offers to take care of assembling a device, since it requires brute force. And the last shot shows her in front of a poster advertising a science fair, but the girl turns away and puts on her lipstick, because she was finally ‘convinced’ to comply to the societal norms. Even though we still have a long way to go with this, there are many resources such as Hello Ruby which can be used to attract and keep girls close to computing. On top of this, even though most school curricula include coding within the framework of CS courses, let’s not forget that it can also be a useful tool across other disciplines. For instance, you can put together a pendulum simulation, where students can see what happens when they experiment with the different structural and physical parameters of the device, taking the physics lesson one step further than staying with equations on the whiteboard.
- Now, the problem with many schools, especially those in isolated areas is that it’s difficult to build and maintain a computer lab, especially when networking and high-quality internet access are absolutely essential these days. I would argue that connectivity is much more important than raw computing power, since most software run on school computer labs is relatively lightweight and the focus of most activities is on or around interaction and information exchange. But even if your computers are low tech or you don’t have a computer lab at all, you can still experiment with what is called unplugged activities. For instance, you can design and debug algorithms deployed on tangible objects, such as plastic coffee cups or you can simulate how messages are spread via the internet, using the same protocols that email and web access are using. This will give you the opportunity to discuss concepts such as servers and clients, routing, what happens when a node collapses or is overloaded, how network attacks work, and so on. Besides being fun, these activities help the students develop a broader understanding of our highly connected world and maybe develop a sense of how insecure internet access and information sharing is these days.
- Where to go next. Obviously, Google is your best friend here, but if you’re looking for tried and tested coding resources in your language, you can start from the Europe Code Week website. The EU Code Week took place last month and more than 4000 events took place in school, hacker spaces and coworking or public spaces across Europe. Now that the Hour of Code is just around the corner, you can add your events in the EU Code Week pool and become members of the largest self-organised coding and teaching community in Europe. The Hour of Code is also a great repository of teaching resources in English. The advantage of this website is that it covers pretty much everything from scratch-like exercises featuring everyone’s favourite Angry Birds, to drawing elaborate shapes to developing your own digital game. Plus there are motivating videos with singers and actors and other celebrities which you can use to motivate students and their parents to take up coding. Finally, there is an increasing number of activities designed to attract girls and adult females to coding. This is extremely important from a societal point of view, not only because it can assist in empowering people who have limited access to employment, but also because there are currently hundreds of thousands of unfilled job posts in Europe at the moment and that’s holding our economy and our society back. The only way to fill these posts is if more women start coding, despite not having a formal, university degree on that. In Greece, we launched the Girls Go Coding initiative last month, which was very warmly accepted, showing that there’s a huge gap when it comes to coding skills in women.
- These are the addresses of the websites I mentioned.
- Just think about the possibilities when people take up coding. We can’t fly, we don’t have x-ray vision, we can’t run superfast or climb on rooftops… but we can order machines to work for us, from domestic appliances to smartphones to robots on Mars! And that’s the closest thing to a superpower we have, and a quite neat one, too!