Written by BFIS Staff
Last week was Computer Science Week at BFIS. Computer Science Week is an annual event that is celebrated globally to promote computer science education and the benefits of learning computer science.
Computer science education is an essential component of preparing students for the future. In today’s world, technology is rapidly evolving, and computer science skills are becoming increasingly important in nearly every industry.
Developing skills through Computer Science projects
By learning computer science, students gain critical problem-solving, collaboration, and computing skills and develop innovation and creativity skills that can be applied and transferred across many fields and subject areas.
In Elementary schools students participated in a variety of activities, including using the Dash robots to explore fractions while coding, testing and providing feedback on video games designed by BFIS students in their computer-science classes, using stop-motion animation to demonstrate the suns’ location in the sky, exploring Scratch Junior, participating in Hour of Code activities, using micro bits to program solutions to explorers’ problems, using Codable Crafts for digital storytelling and animation, and more!
Kindergarten students and Scratch Junior
Kindergarten students explored this week Scratch Junior, an iPad application that allows them to create characters (sprites) and backgrounds, and to program the characters, to move, speak, and interact using block coding.
This ties into the kindergarten “how to” writing unit as coding iinvolves giving computers (or characters in this case) steps to follow. Before using our iPads, we used printed blocks of code and used body movement to represent a sprite following instructions with the same language used during the writing unit: first, then, next, finally.
When we think about creation vs. consumption on devices, Scratch Junior is a great example of a creation app that builds skills like sequential thinking and problem solving. It is a free application and is a great one to have students try out at home.
In Middle and High School students held several Coding competitions, Grade 10 students instructed a Design Technology master class to Grade 5 students, Grade 9 students tested their computer game designs with Grade 1 students to get their feedback and the Robotics team showcased their robots in the High School lawn during lunch.
It was a fantastic Computer Science Week!
Support at home
You can support your child’s interest in computer science and technology at home by encouraging them to participate in coding challenges, providing access to online resources and tutorials, or through purchasing various robotics/coding systems. By working together, we can help prepare our students for success in the digital age.
