Merlin Park Primary School learners wrote the first lines of coding.
The Africa Code Week 2021 has kicked off with 75 learners at Merlin Park Primary School.
They wrote their first lines of Code in a workshop organised by Mpumalanga ICT Club on Saturday, October 16.
The children got a taste of what programming is like by engaging in the Scratch programming language.
They also learn different careers where programming is essential to spark their interests in Stem careers.
Africa Code Week is a digital skills development initiative that has benefitted millions of young Africans since 2016 and Mpumalanga ICT Club joined forces to ensure that no child in Mpumalanga is left behind when it comes to learning the Coding skill.
“Although we are known for our popular initiative called DigiGirlz in South Africa, today we included boys to launch our Africa Code Week initiative here at Merlin Park School,” Ms Nomusa Keninda told Witbank News.
She is the founder of the Mpumalanga ICT Club and an eLearning specialist for the Mpumalanga Department of Education.
Her ICT Club has introduced more than 10 000 learners in Coding with more girls taking part in most of her coding workshops since 2016 in and around eMalahleni.
Onothando Damana was quick to decide on what he wanted to become in future.
“I want to be an apps developer”.
Although the learners were introduced to coding for the first time, their level of creativity and collaboration looked very mature.
They came with brilliant ideas of what they wanted to achieve on the Scratch platform.
Scratch programming designs games, interactive art, and animated stories.
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The workshop assisted teachers to get their first taste of teaching the Coding curriculum in the classroom since the school is one of the piloting schools in the province.
Their anxiety to teach coding has been eliminated now.
What stood out from this workshop is that learners were able to integrate multiple devices to complete their chosen projects.
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They were able to extract some resources from their smartphones to their laptops without any help from facilitators to innovate Scratch characters and sounds, and that was a great skill displayed by the learners.
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