On Monday 5th December 2022 to kick start our annual Hour of Code week we had Rebecca Dower (Past Student) and her colleagues from Bazaar Voice attend Belfast Model School for Girls to take a ‘Design Thinking Workshop’ with both 8LJ and 9NW.
The idea of this workshop was to get the students to understand that if they were to go into the IT industry that they just don’t ‘Code’ and that there is a lot going on behind the scenes. The students got to complete the 5 stages of design thinking:
- Empathize
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
This helped the students get a taste of how apps/websites begin and they even got to create their own solutions for different personas based on a given problem. This was such a fun and inciteful workshop.
On Tuesday 6th December 2022 we had Siobhan Flynn the Educational Outreach Officer for Ulster University attend Belfast Model School for Girls to take a robotics workshop with 9LBN. Siobhan had brought with her multiple Lego robots that where already built and through an app on the iPads the students could then control their robots. Siobhan taught them how to use different blocks of code on the app to program their robot to do a number of things such as; go forwards, backwards, turn left, turn right, respond to a colour sensor and a touch sensor. Some student even got to push themselves further and tried different challenges. We even got time for a programmed robot race! See coding really is fun!
