Socialise and code
Publication date: January 10, 2022
By Anxhela Gjana, Leading Teacher in Code Week and Study Group Leader teacher in Kukes, Albania.
In the framework of the implementation of the MOOC for EU Code Week 2021, we organised a study group in Kukes, Albania with four teachers -three that attended the face-to-face meetings and one who joined the meetings online-.
During the first meeting, we came up with the idea of helping a group of students of Computer Science in American Corner Kukes to gain social skills by exchanging experiences and helping children to code.
The Computer Science group had participated in previous coding activitiesand classes, so both the 17- and 18-year-olds and me as the leading teacher of the group, got involved in the organisation.
After creating a group with interested children from the community, I set the dates of our four meetings to coincide with the EU Code Week. Each of these meetings would welcome twenty children between ages 8-12 and includeplugged and unplugged activities.
In every encounter, the children from the community and my teenage pupils participated in coding activities, not only creating, and supporting innovation but generating a very friendly social environment, which often brought fun moments within the group.
The students involved learned more about Artificial Intelligence, how robots are created, the encoding of information, the creation of computer networks, and further improved their social skills, something that was needed after the online learning period undergone in the past months.
None of this would have been possible without the help and infrastructure of the American Corner Kukes and the Këndi BE Kukes, which extended certificates to all children participating in each day of the activity.
The kids involved belonged to the “HavziNela” school and the “Avni Rustemi” school, located in Kukes.Since the activities were created within the Bootcamp, we as a study group were selected to record one of our activities in the Code Week map and, after being evaluated and obtaining 100%, we earned the certificate given by the European Schoolnet Academy.
In the list below you can find the activities we created with the students, in a few days since we had about 2 hours I chose to do 2 activities.
https://codeweek.eu/view/433021/il-mio-robot
https://codeweek.eu/view/432952/drawing-with-pixel
https://codeweek.eu/view/417047/cs-first-unplugged-activities-in-kukes
https://codeweek.eu/view/402825/tresure-hunt
https://codeweek.eu/view/402603/design-your-own-robot
https://codeweek.eu/view/386673/train-an-ai-bot
