Coding at Summerwood

 

Coding began at Summerwood in Term 2 IN 2022. Learners from grade 5, 6 & 7 were invited. The Leva Foundation (a non-profit organization)  trained a group of learners in Tanks and Rangers Unplugged Coding. Unplugged coding is coding using cell phones and tokens. No internet connection is required. Throughout the whole year they are an amazing support system for our school.

 

 

We annually compete in a variety of tournaments.

We attended the Rangers Unplugged coding competitions and the Mandela Day Coding Competition in 2022 . We ran the first Interschools Competition at Summerwood. This was a huge success. Prizes were sponsored by parents and Bargain Books SA. David Brown from Amazon Security sent a message to the learners encouraging them to follow their dreams. This event was used to promote unplugged coding in the metro.

 

We host our own Extreme Unplugged Photo Competition. Learners are encouraged to find the most extreme place to code. Photos are submitted and members of the Leva Foundation vote for the most extreme photo. The top three learners win prizes and their photos are displayed in the Herald Paper.

 

At the end of term 3 in 2022  we hosted the first Unplugged League Event in the metro. Summerwood competed against Greenwood and Herbert Hurd for a floating trophy. These league events will be held once a term and the winning school will keep the floating trophy for the term and host the event the following term.

Summerwood was one of a few schools chosen to test run the Unplugged Boats App. The learners are given an opportunity to play the game on their phones. A Summerwood learner came first in 2022  and won the R500 prize.

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The National Unplugged Boated Competition was launched on Heritage Day of 2022 and ran for two weeks over the September holidays. One of our Summerwood learners managed to come 27th in the country. This is a huge achievement as this competition was open to high schools and primary / preparatory schools.

 

We were also invited to the Stulting Robotics Competition in 2022. Schools who had never done Robotics before, competed against each other to create a Water tanker which could operate using solar or wind energy. The learners had to build their model; Promote / advertise why their model was the best; and code their model to deliver water to three different houses.

The learners thoroughly enjoyed the event and our Grade 6 group won gold, and our grade 5 group won silver.

 

CodeAbot approached our school and offered 10 of our grade 4 & 5 learners a 6-month scholarship at CodeAbot. The 10 learners who attended are exposed to coding and robotics.

 

Our teachers attended an Integrated Coding & Robotics with Six bricks workshop in 2022. This workshop was run by the SAOU and showed our teachers how coding can be integrated into the classroom. We are waiting for the Department of Education to confirm when Coding and Robotics will be official part of our curriculum. In the interim we are training our teachers and sourcing the equipment need to implement coding in the foundation phase. 

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The Department has yet publish the final curricula for "Digital Skills for all three school phases." Textbooks from publishers are available, based on the Draft curricula.

 

Looking to the future.

• Summerwood has applied for a coding grant from UNISA. This will allow us to expose the coding club and certain grades to Lego Robotics.

• CodeAbot has been invited to run a workshop with our grade 1 and 2 learners.

• All the learners who have represented Summerwood at coding events and attended the coding lessons throughout the term will receive their coding badge in 2023.

• A wish for 2023, would be for our Coding team, which competes at competition, to have a coding shirt to wear.