By Jessie Weisner (Twitter: @Jessie__Weisner)

Coding program comes to Rocky

Aug 15, 2018 | 3:11 PM

A non-profit organization is coming to Rocky Mountain House to provide a free full-day workshop on coding for K-12 teachers.

Kids Code Jeunesse, partnering with Lighthouse Labs, is hosting the workshop on August 21 at West Central High School, aiming to introduce educators to computational thinking and coding.

The goal of the program is to teach and display the benefits of coding for children, and aid teachers in integrating coding into their classrooms.

“Coding is a tool for computational thinking, which is kind of the deeper picture,” says Akhila Wolfe, Kids Code Jeunesse Western Regional Manager. “Computational thinking is the way to think when you’re applying logic and breaking down problems into ways to solve them and find creative solutions. That’s not just limited to technology, that’s something you can apply to so many aspects of your life. By learning to code, you develop these skills that will broaden the scope of how you learn.”

Wolfe adds that coding is beneficial in today’s society in that it allows children to look at the world in a different light.

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“By learning coding, children are learning a really powerful skill for this 21st century,” says Wolfe. “They make a shift from being a consumer to being a creator of technology and really understanding how it works and why things are the way they are.”

Kids Code Jeunesse was founded in 2013 in Montreal, and eventually expanded across the country.

The organization is working off the CanCode grant, a federal program that is investing $50 million over two years to initiatives that provides coding and digital skills opportunities for youth K-12.

The grant allowed them to expand in Alberta over the last year, and travel to its first rural location in the province, Rocky Mountain House.

The main message the organization hopes to spread is that every child should have the opportunity to learn code, no matter where they live.

“I think one of the challenges in rural areas is accessibility, such as infrastructure like the, but for some it’s just access to the training that the support teachers need to integrate this into the classroom,” Wolfe says.

Eighty-nine teachers are currently signed up for the program, many from out of town. Those attending will be from Wildrose School Division, Red Deer Public Schools, Chinook’s Edge School Division, Star Catholic School Division, and even a few from Saskatchewan.

“Teachers are extremely creative and they really understand that different children sometimes need to access things in different ways,” says Wolfe. “Teachers have an

exceptional talent in allowing kids to approach it in different ways and modify and adapt the way they do it, so it’s really accessible to all kids.”

In addition to the workshops, Kids Code Jeunesse offers code clubs, which are local community clubs for kids to explore coding even further. The clubs are run by local volunteers, and the organization facilitates the learning by providing projects.

It’s their hope that this foray into Rocky will spawn a few new local code clubs, which would help destroy the stigma that exists around the skill.

“We have this stereotype of a person sitting and putting all these numbers into a computer by themselves in a basement, and that’s totally not what it is,” Wolfe says. “By having these things in the community you’re really shifting the mindset of the whole community to support those children in learning how to code.”

More information is at codecreateteach.ca.