JS Academic Enrichment Program: Coding for Change

By Elizabeth Gasparini
Learning Technology Integrator

As part of the Junior School Academic Enrichment Program, students in Grades 3-5 were invited to join the Coding for Change challenge this year. The coding challenge encourages students to advance their ideas about global mindedness and sustainability by creating a Scratch program that highlights an important local or global issue. Students were encouraged to look to the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a resource for investigating and choosing a particular issue. Throughout this challenge, they were also developing their computational thinking through the use of problem-solving and sequencing skills, and logical thinking.

The young programmers also had to keep in mind that Junior School students would be the audience for their program so they had to keep their design accessible and user friendly so that young students could understand the highlighted issue and how they could help. Some of the technical skills the students had to learn and use were creating sprites, backgrounds and sound effects. Also, they needed to create and code variables to keep track of scoring/points and create and broadcast events to initiate certain coding elements. Some of the important issues they chose to highlight were gender equality, deforestation, over-fishing, recycling, and clean water and sanitation. We had 16 students take on the coding challenge this year and we’ve collected their programs in a site so that the Branksome Hall Asia community can learn from them as well. Please visit them by going to bit.ly/coding4change and congratulations to our amazing Junior School programmers!