3 minute read
CODE BREAKS
How live online learning boosts children’s technological confidence
By ELIZABETH TWEEDALE
Have you been juggling working from home/ homeschooling/ feeding everyone all day every day/staying positive? We can’t underestimate the multiple effects of this difficult time - but we can look to see if there is anything to be learned - and in our case from an educational perspective.
We at Cypher dramatically changed the way we work over the lockdown period. Our first thoughts were with the children. We are educators, and spend our time designing lessons that will intrigue and excite children to learn to code and delivering them to all sorts of children. We used to do that only at in-person holiday camps. We were determined that this pandemic, scary enough on its own, would not stop kids being inspired and optimistic about their future.
One week before lockdown, and two weeks before our scheduled Easter holiday camps were due to start, we made the decision to switch all our camps to Live Online. We cut the camp down to 90-minutes, committed to a teacher being present and visible throughout all the sessions, kept class sizes small, 4-6 students, and made four sessions a day to fit with parents daily schedules.
So, how did this work out? We were both amazed and extremely pleased that both parents and children took to the new offer really well. Parents now at home, with children to entertain all day, were immensely grateful. Kids just loved the great coding content. We have been thrilled to see how enthusiastic our online learners have been. The technological advancements made by our students have been unprecedented, and unlike anything we've seen before.
Looking ahead to the new normal, Live OnLine will remain part of our camps portfolio as we head towards defining what our postlockdown life will look like. Offering our camps online has been hugely beneficial for many students, eliminating any geographical barriers and extending our reach way beyond London with children attending from France, Portugal, Ireland, UAE, the Philippines and the USA. It has also allowed us to open our doors even more widely, running our free Cypher Starters sessions every Thursday afternoon to encourage a wider interest in learning to code and introduce a broad range of children to computational thinking.
This summer we are running our most intensive range of Live Online camps - and making sure that children have the opportunity to work through some of the issues around the effects of Covid-19 while learning about some of the benefits it has brought. We have three creative themes that rotate over the 8 weeks of the holidays. Kids will be learning to code as they plunge deep under the virtual sea and get a submarine view of the sea floor - find out just how long a whale can hold its breath, what effects the lockdown has had on marine life and explore ways to help save our oceans Kids today really care about the environment. The few benefits of the lockdown, like lower air pollution and clearer seas, have opened our eyes to the possibility that our actions can make a difference. Join us to explore environmental issues from re-wilding to recycling, plants to eat to planting trees - our students will be finding out what role code has to play in making this planet a greener, safer place.
Critical to this generation’s success in the future is that they grasp the benefits and advantages of being fluent in computational thinking. This intellectual process allows people to solve problems and instruct computers to operate tasks, to create code. It enables our future leaders to be able to communicate effectively with technology experts, programmers and people all across the globe. Our philosophy is all about engaging children, as young as 5, with computational concepts that can open up a world of possibilities. By teaching broadly through creative themes rather than single coding languages in silos, we make technology relevant to every child and give them the confidence to be more imaginative and experimental.
