St. Albert students learned to talk computer last week as part of a global effort to get kids interested in technology.
Hundreds of students at schools such as Muriel Martin took part in the Hour of Code challenge last week as part of Computer Science Education Week. The challenge has youths perform computer-coding activities for an hour to demonstrate that anyone can learn to program.
Patricia Toth had her Muriel Martin students make the letters of their name flash, spin, and make sounds when clicked during their Hour of Code using the computer language Scratch, which represents commands as Lego-like blocks that snap together.
The idea isn’t so much to teach them a specific programming language as it is to encourage computational thinking, Toth said. By learning to code, students learn to envision and follow a sequence of steps to reach a specific end goal, which is a task many struggle to do.
Many teachers post free Hour of Code challenges for students online, Toth said. One popular program last year had students figure out how to guide Star Wars robot BB-8 through a junkyard, for example.
“This has been a huge motivator for reading and reading comprehension,” said Toth, who teaches French immersion, as students want to read instructions to complete the cool tasks.
Grade 4 student Eric Dibben said he likes working with computers and last year created the app “Danger Chicken” in Toth’s Coding Club.
“An ambulance passes by and then a chicken goes across the road and hears a doorbell,” he explained of the app.
“After a couple of seconds, he explodes.”
The skills learned during the Hour of Code are applicable to all subject areas, said Cameron Makovichuk, who led his students through it at Robert Rundle.
“They’re solving problems together, designing projects, they’re working in pairs to communicate their ideas together.”
Coding has a lot of crossover with math, as it can involve angles, ratios, and negative integers, Makovichuk said. Students can also learn to create their own physics and chemistry models with code.
Learning to debug programs also teaches kids to learn from their mistakes, which is what many already do when playing video games.
“They’re failing a lot of times in a video game but they don’t see it as failure, they see it as learning,” Makovichuk said.
Visit hourofcode.com/ca for details on the Hour of Code.
Lorne Akins students are wrapping up a truckload of donated food this week in preparation for their annual student-teacher hockey faceoff at Akinsdale Arena.
Akins students have been collecting a small mountain of non-perishable food items this month in the lead-up to the school’s annual students versus teachers hockey/ringette game next week.
The long-running charity event has students bring in food donations for the Kinette Club’s Christmas hamper program for a shot at door prizes or a spot on the student team, said game organizer Moritz Schmidt. The food is all piled in the front lobby right now, but it will be shipped off to the Kinettes. The students typically collect several truckloads of food each year.
The whole school comes out to the game, which the teachers have won for several years running.
“This year I think it’ll be tough for the teachers,” he added, as there were a number of great student players in the school. Most of the teacher players have done precisely zero training to prepare for the big game.
Schmidt said he hoped the game and donation drive would show students how each of them could make a positive difference in the world.
The game is open to the public and starts at about 9:30 a.m. this Dec. 23. Call the school at 780-460-3728 for details.
