CORNWALL, Ontario – Two separate coding events were held in the community this weekend.
Kids Learning Code was held between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. at the Cornwall Public Library on Saturday, Oct. 27, where children learned how to build their own video games in a program called Scratch. They also connected a circuit board to create game controllers using bananas, gummy worms, Play-Doh, and tin foil.
“Many of the kids loved it and told me they are excited to attend our next one (in January),” said Kelly Bergeron who hosted the event. According to Bergeron, 80 per cent of participants were new to the program.
Bergeron has taught hundreds of workshops under Code Heroes and Canada Learning Code across Eastern ON. Workshops are hosted monthly in the city, and schools and organizations can also request a visit from the Code Mobile at http://codemobile.rocks.
“Learning to code is important to be able to apply and develop life skills such as computational thinking, creativity, problem solving, and collaboration,” explained Bergeron.
Teachers also had the opportunity to learn how to code during TeacherCon 2018 at Nav Centre this weekend from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 27 and 28. According to Sharon Brown, Educator Program Manager, the multi-day experience is designed to help kindergarten to grade 12 teachers introduce coding into their lesson plans and help them to understand how it can be introduced across different subject areas
“Recently, in the last year, we have been given a huge federal grant in order to bring coding into proper formal education, so TeacherCon is 100 per cent funded for that, so teachers don’t pay anything for this experience,” explained Brown, who also said that the grant has contributed to Code Mobile sessions.
Brown knows that three provinces have already introduced coding and computational thinking into their curriculum. She believes this awareness and implementation is becoming an international movement, as well as a national movement.
“We’re trying to reach all teaching class levels,” said Brown. “We have really expanded our content so we can address more high school level (learning).”
An instructor from Vancouver introduced teachers to coding and debugging in Scratch, HTML and CSS coding for web pages, tech stations featuring other tools, and various other activities.
To learn more, visit www.canadalearningcode.ca.
