Green coding

Publication date: June 14, 2022

By Danijela Maurac, EU Code Week Leading Teacher Croatia

We witness a time when the environment is changing more and more every day due to the careless actions of man in nature. It has never been more necessary to improve people’s awareness of nature conservation. Teachers have the important task of encouraging students from an early age to think about conservation and sustainability in order to grow into conscientious and responsible citizens.

A large number of activities can be carried out with students through interdisciplinary connections of topics both in the classroom and outside it. Get to know the flora and fauna, ecosystems and communities, study phenomena and changes, experiment, recycle and learn through the game of coding.

On the occasion of the World Forest Day, the students of the Elementary School Bol, Split, performed several activities of unplugged coding, but also using AI and got to know the trees that grow in the environment of our school.

The first activity was to go out into the school yard and, using the Pla@ntNet app, photograph the selected tree. After that, the students studied the tree and made a personal map of the tree by finding various sources on the internet. With the Pl@ntNet app, they made a video and revived their tree.

The next activity was unplugged coding. We registered the activity as an event on the e-Twinning platform, but also the EU Code Week, and through social networks we invited other teachers and students to join us. The students had to help the B-bot find its way, but watch out for the discarded plastic.

We were happy to see the works of the students on our Padlet. We realized that EU Code Week can connect us with students around the world with a variety of topics and activities. We continued with the “green” activities and signed up for the STEM Discovery Campaign, thus connecting several educational communities and platforms in order to encourage others to think about nature conservation.