The course on Malta is organized by Smart Solutions LTD and it took place at St. Clare's College near the town of Pembroke. The introductory part was the talk about Computational Thinking (CT) by our trainer Keith Aquilina.
The Ministry of education on Malta works greatly on introducing coding and computational thinking into the curricula, plus they have teachers who support other teachers in integration of technology in the lessons. On Malta they cherish digital literacy as a crosscurricular skill and use DigComp European framework of reference for the digital skills. (PDF guide available here)
The computers we worked on were HP Bang&Olufsen, and they are part of the inventory of St. Clare's College for girls. The ICT lab has new computers (12) and 7 older computers.
The first tool we worked on was Scratch. An excellent idea to start working in Scratch is using cards with tasks, thanks to which students can learn to code, solve problems and think computationally. They also learn to make animations and add sounds. The cards are available for free on the given link and can be printed out and laminated, or thay can be bought at Amazon.
Coding and Apps
Hour of Code is a global movement where students are encouraged to gain skills for life and work in the 21st century through coding activities that develop their digital skills and computational thinking.
Web page Code.org offers a large number of the activities, ready-made lesson plans and resources for classroom. Teachers can created their classes, add students, courses and activities and monitor the students' progress. The database contains suggestions of lesson plans, curriculum overview, courses examples and other useful information. (an example of curriculum guide)
One of the most attractive apps that we tried in the course is Minecraft. It has simple examples for learning coding for all students ages.
Lightbot is another great example of a game that teaches coding. The study materials and teaching resources for teachers are available at: http://lightbot.com/resources.html. Teachers can also print out the commands for offline activities: http://lightbot.com/Lightbot_PrintableIcons.pdf
Kodable and
Codemonkey are similar tools to Code.org for teaching and learning coding skills.
For older students there is
Code Combat for learning coding in Python, and
GreenFoot for learning coding in Java.
Robots in education
In Malta, the government buys robots for educational institutions and the division for learning distributes them to schools according to their needs.
The firs robot we met was Beebot. It is used for younger learners and can be used for teaching numeracy, maths and linguistic activities.
The second robot we tried was
Probot. It is mostly used in maths lessons, since it has the possibility to measure angles and you can code the procedures to draw geometrical shapes. Our group's task was to code the robot to find the treasure by coordinates and using straight lines only.:
The most interesting robots we tried were
Lego WeDo 2.0 that have the possibilities of learning coding robots with clear instructions and apps on tablets and later creativity once the basic instructions are achieved. When we got the basic steps, the task was to create a robot that will be faster than the opponent's team. In this way we were exploring the physics laws of the force. The website for teachers offers lesson plans and projects for various subjects.
The last robot we tried was je
Sphero which is impressive and in the video you can get the idea of how to use it in education:
Sphero also has
edu page with teacher resources.
Code Week launched a new website for teachers so that the materials and resources for organizing evens would be more available. Teachers can organize events in schools like "Code Evenings" or similar activities that make coding more attractive to a wider audience.
Microsoft Make Code tools are used for creating codes and are applied for programming Micro:bit. On their pages there are available finished projects and examples for all the subjects how to implement coding into the lessons.
Micro:bit coding https://microbit.org/ was already familiar to some of us in our school, because Croatian Makers donated Micro:bits to the students of 6th grade and some of the teachers could attend seminars of how to use them in the lessons. In Malta, we were creating simple quizzes, our own pedometer to count the steps we make and we tried to create our own projects and bring ideas to life for our classes. It was very fun!
The option we really appreciated was connecting Micro:bit to Scratch thanks to the installation of Scratch Link.
Lego Education is another interesting platform that offers the database of study and teaching materials for teachers, students and the possibilites of professional development, browsing lesson plans by students age, even the possibilities of donations: https://education.lego.com/en-us/grants-and-funding
Dr. Scratch is an assessment website that has the tools to automatically assess a finished Scratch project based on the URL link to the student's project. The tools has the criteria and the student can get a certificate and the feedback about how well they have developed their coding skills.
App Inventor is also an MIT app similar to Scratch. It is uesd freely for educational purposes to create your own apps for Android platform. The students can learn how to code via the app from the easy projects to the advanced ones.
Computer Science for Fun is a website with resources for puzzles and similar activities to introduce computational thinking.
Lego Mindstroms offers the possibilities to program robots for older students and secondary school.
Finally, we have developed our own plans of how to integrate computational thinking in our own subjects and schools and we have shared them on a collaborative Padlet: https://padlet.com/keith_aquilina/rxrtf5cesft
Final evaluation activities
Final days' activities were group work and creating a final presentation as the evaluation part of the course. We were working collaboratively on our project of creating a school project to use in our context (Primary School Strahoninec) and to involve students, teachers and interested parents or local community members into computational thinking and coding. Here is the final presentation we have made: