Coding across generations

Publication date: December 5, 2018

The Czech Center for International Cooperation in Education promotes coding and digital skills throughout the year. However, CodeWeek 2018 was a good opportunity to prepare a very special afternoon activity.

The center named the session “Do you manage to become a programmer in 5 minutes?” On 16 October we opened our premises located in the center of Prague to show and explain various coding activities to the public.

The objective of the event was to enable everybody to write their first line of code or to control a robot. We promoted the event through our social media accounts in advance, but we also personally invited people waiting for a tram or just passing by to join the event.

Participants could try 5 different tasks (Bee-bot, Ozobot, etc.) and several students from local schools help them by explaining how coding works.

The event was really successful as a reward we could see enthusiasm and joy in all the faces across generations.

We also helped to reduce some of the stereotypes linked to coding. We managed to persuade several mothers that coding can be a fun activity even for their little daughters.

We successfully demonstrated to adults and seniors that they could start coding at any age.

We showed to the public that developing computational thinking in schools is an attractive and engaging activity.

We were very pleased that the session raised such an interest across different age groups. Apart from this event, we also organized activities for teachers to help them include coding in their lessons, such as workshops and eTwinning webinar. However, it is sometimes difficult for teachers to break down parents´ prejudices that coding is rather extracurricular activity for technology enthusiasts.

We are convinced that the outdoor session changed mindset at least of some adults that it is worth developing digital skills and computational thinking of every child.

This post was written by Vladimíra Pavlicová, eTwinning National Support Service from the Czech Centre for International Cooperation in Education.