It’s Hour of Code week, where people around the world try to spark an interest in coding to help address skill shortages and gender imbalances in the high tech sector.
This year BCIT Computing went big with a train-the-trainer model, and welcomed about 85 K-12 teachers from across the Metro Region for Hour of Code: Deliver with Confidence.
The event featured BCIT computing instructors Medhat Elmasry, Chi En Huang and Carly Orr, whose aim was to demystify basic coding activities for the teachers, many of whom had no experience in this growing area.
The teachers were led through presentations and activities designed to help them go back to their classes and participate with their students in Hour of Code, a global event to promote coding that runs this week, Dec. 5-11.
Interest was high: over 100 teachers registered within 30 hours of the event announcement.
Instructor Carly Orr even brought a silicon wafer, used for the fabrication of integrated circuits, which are then cut and packaged into “chips,” to show what lives inside all these mysterious devices. “Code is what gives instructions that are translated through many layers of software into signals that control the wires and transistors in these chips”, explains Orr.
Teachers were very pleased and reported the event “gave me confidence to begin the process of introducing coding to my students.”
The BCIT team was happy too. Orr reflected that “it was exciting to see teachers and administrators, many with no prior knowledge of coding, realize how doing a ‘game-like’ Hour-of-Code activity fits into the big picture of training us how to think like a computer, and hence be able to give instructions to a computer.”