Pupils on board to learn coding skills

A virtual coding game tournament aimed at teaching youngsters about marine plastic pollution and allowing them to get involved in the battle against Covid-19 launched yesterday.

The BOATS tournament, which includes pupils from 20 schools in Nelson Mandela Bay, East London and as far afield as Mozambique, continues the pioneering work by Nelson Mandela University to teach young people basic programming skills via their cellphones.

Prof Jean Greyling, associate professor at NMU, said the tournament, which was organised in co-operation with eight private sector partners, had been sparked by the lockdown.

“Because of the regulations, physical coding workshops cannot take place.

“So we have added features to BOATS which allows for virtual tournaments with pupils participating from home.

“For instance, scores are emailed directly from the app to a central database.”

The participating primary and high schools were sent information via WhatsApp, they forwarded it to their pupils, and the tournament began at 8am.

The game had geared 30odd questions about plastic pollution in the oceans, and each pupil played against his or her phone, he said.

“The phone or iBot makes use of basic artificial intelligence to make its own choices during its turn.

“The learners and the iBot have to each move their boat around on a grid using basic commands, with the goal of picking up plastic pollution in the sea.”

All the pupils competed simultaneously through the two weeks of the tournament, he said.

“As each pupil and the iBot he or she is playing against navigate successfully, they score points and these points are sent to us to collate.

“The more they play, the more questions they see, and the more they know the correct answers.

“This is where the marine pollution awareness comes in.”

Greyling said a good programmer was someone with good mathematical and computational logic skills.

“BOATS mainly focuses on initial skills identified in the early primary school curriculum, of which the main one is spatial awareness. Other soft skills which come into play with this tournament, which are also relevant to programming, are skills such as passion, the desire to learn and perseverance.

“In the build-up to the tournament, I have already seen these skills at play with pupils practising and contacting me for further details.”

When the tournament ended on June 5, points scored through the fortnight would be added up and the pupils with the top 10 scores would each win R100 data, he said.

“The school which had the most pupils participating will receive R4,000 to donate to a Covid-19 related cause.

“Most have identified causes linked to their schools like more data for pupils and feeding schemes which they support.”