Pupils participate in coding day which helps computational thinking skills

A GROUP of 18 fourth class pupils from St Aidan’s Senior National School in Brookfield participated in a coding day in the school last week.

The day’s events were led by Gilda Petri from Google’s data centre and Neil O’Toole from Code School Finland, and the children got to showcase some of their projects.

The day followed on from training provided to nine teachers from St Aidan’s SNS at Code School Europe, including Ms Somerville whose fourth class students presented at the coding day.

Commenting on the importance of children learning to code, Neil O’Toole from Code School Finland told The Echo: “Coding at school helps develop the computational thinking skills that are required in any job where you have to break a process down into steps and then put [them] together again.

“It also teaches teamwork and problem-solving skills.”

The students presented animation projects that they had created using a coding programme called Scratch, and on the coding day they learned more advanced functions of the software.

Comments from the students included: “Learning coding is fun, I like learning from others about Scratch”, and one child said they enjoyed coding as it let them use their imagination.

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