Machine learning helps teachers to teach coding

Publication date: June 29, 2018

By Kristian Langborg-Hansen, Danish Code Week ambassador

The teachers in the Triangle Region in southern Denmark can look forward to being better prepared for teaching coding – by training and by machine learning.

A grant from Google has made a joint project possible between the private company App Academy, the textbook publisher Gyldendal and the organization Trekantsomraadet, that works for more co-operation between the municipalities of the Triangle Region in Denmark.

In the coming school year 150 teachers will go through online training in computer programming and the online training itself is supported by machine learning. This enables automatic adaption of the content of the training to each teacher. When the teacher has completed the course, she will get a personalized lesson plan ready to be applied in the class room. This lesson plan is generated based on an analysis of how the teachers has fulfilled the training.

Project manager, Morten Barfod Søegaard from App Academy, says ”It’s challenging to acquire new technical knowledge and convert that into great teaching at the same time. This project aims at making this easier for the teachers, so that they can focus on the being great teachers to the thousands of children that will be affected by this project.”

To ensure the retention, the participating teachers form a community of practice sharing knowledge and experience on teaching new technologies.

Danish Code Week ambassador, Kristian Langborg-Hansen, says: ”I’m excited that Google has chosen to support a Danish project as the only Scandinavian one, and I’m sure this means many more children will learn coding; not only in this year’s code weeks, but in coming years as well.”

The content of the course is based on the How to code book series that has books for teachers and pupils. The Danish translations of these are published by Gyldendal.