A MANDELA Day Coding Tournament was held at Orient Islamic School this morning, where 10 Durban schools from the Durban Central District came together to participate and compete in coding competitions and some Durban University of Technology’s robots came out to play.
The competitions are played with the TANKS coding app which was developed by postgraduate student at Nelson Mandela University, Byron Batteson. The purpose of the app is to introduce coding concepts to learners without the use of computers. The desperate shortage of software developers, combined with the challenge of thousands of schools that do not have computer laboratories, makes this project very relevant in South Africa.
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Since 2017, the project (the app) has been shared by a collaboration between Nelson Mandela University and the Leva Foundation and has reached nearly 50 000 learners, with coding kits being distributed to over 500 schools in South Africa and the greater African continent.
This morning’s tournament was the first of its kind for the schools of the Durban Central District. The competition kicked off at 09:00, and although hosted in Orient Islamic School’s spacious hall, the event was a collaboration between all 10 schools.
In addition to the learners competing in the tournament, the Durban University of Technology Faculty of Accounting and Informatics was in attendance to display their impressive range of robotics technology and hosted a robotics demonstration for the learners and teachers that were present.
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Taking centre stage were PEPA and NAO, two semi-humanoid robots that have been programmed by the DUT Faculty of Accounting and Informatics team to do some remarkable things!
Watch this video to see the robotics display and find out more about these extraordinary robots!
Watch here:
Read more about the Mandela Day Coding Tournament in the next edition of the Berea Mail!
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