Kings of computing
PHYSICAL isolation is not impeding engagement in the Digital Technologies Curriculum at King Island District High School or elsewhere in Tasmania.
The ability to connect online to the wider community is offering opportunities to students and teachers that were not previously available.
Starting this week and running until March 23, the International Bebras Challenge will be presented to students from Years 3-8, along with other work the staff and students are doing in preparation for the implementation of the Digital Technologies Curriculum.
The Australian representative in the Bebras Community, Sarah Hobson, attends the international workshops each year where education professionals gather to curate and further develop questions submitted by member countries from across the globe.
“The Bebras challenge is an international initiative aiming to promote Digital Technologies and computational thinking among school students from Grades 3 through to 12,” Sarah says.
This is an excellent opportunity for students, either individually or in teams, to solve computer science challenges that provides an insight for teachers, who may then integrate further computational challenges into their teaching and learning programs.
The challenge is not a competition as students may work in teams of two or three or as individuals depending on their situation.
Year 4/5 teacher Jodi Silk and assistant principal Phillip Holbrook at King Island District High School recently introduced the BBC microbit Digital Processor (http://microbit.org/code/) to their students, to support coding skills in computational, design and systems thinking, which in turn complements the Bebras challenge.
The students are provided with opportunities to develop innovative and creative solutions to challenges. One of the tasks they are hoping to develop later in the year is to use the BBC microbit processor to program a soil moisture sensor for the golf hole created as part of a school project.
The students will be able to simulate a program to build an automated watering system that turns on when the sensor attached to a microbit is triggered as the soil dries.
The enthusiasm of the students that is so clearly evident at King Island DHS underpins the importance of the Digital Technologies Curriculum to prepare students for opportunities that use skills taught and developed at school.
King Island with its highly productive agricultural, tour- ism, golfing and fishing industries will clearly benefit from the digital technology and design skills the students will have gained at the completion of their education. Registrations for the Bebras challenge are open now at www.bebras.edu.au/