Our VIA was about teaching scratch to young children. Our club went down on 3 separate sessions, each with 2 hours to teach children how to programme using scratch.
These children come from less privileged backgrounds, and their families may not have the resources, the money to support their children's exploration in such areas outside of their school work. Through this VIA we hoped to be able to provide them with such an opportunity to be exposed to coding. Our target group for this project was children who were aged 10-12 years old. We had around 20 children who participated in our VIA event, which we co hosted with AMK CDAC. CDAC is a non-profit organisation which offers programmes and assistance schemes to help the less-privileged in the community to maximise their potential and strive for social mobility through self-help and mutual support. They function like a community center and they will regularly host events for the less privileged to take part in. Some of the events that the centre hosts for the participants are sessions like reading sessions for children and computer lessons for the elderly, etc.
This programming software, scratch, that we taught to the children is a block-based visual programming language, designed for children of age 8-16 to easily create online projects using a block-like interface. What the software does is that it changes lines of complicated codes which are not easy for children to understand, into simple and easy to understand blocks, which can be fitted together like lego, for children to easily code a small project from scratch.
This picture shows an example of the encoding blocks.
The function of each block is easy to understand and comprehend for young children, as all they have to do is read the functions of each block, then chain them up together in a chain of blocks, to programme something.
This is an example of a code that can be done using scratch, where these blocks are put together in this manner to make the cat say "hello my name is scratch" when the green flag is clicked to run the code.
We had 4 intended outcomes of our project:
(1) We hope to be able to expose these children to scratch at a young age, so that they will have a basic understanding of coding and programming. Through our fun lesson content, we hope to be able to spark the interest of these children, introducing them to a healthy and fun pastime besides gaming.
(2) As a club, learn how we can better contribute to society through using our strengths and interests in coding. Through the activity, we can broaden our knowledge of ways we can contribute to society, by making use of our passion and strengths in coding, learning how we can use our strengths to help the less fortunate in our society.
(3) We can also learn how to better interact and communicate with others. Communicating with young children and keeping them attentive can be a challenge, and through this activity, our club members will be able to pick up valuable experience and skills in terms of how to connect with and communicate with young children.
(4) We hope that through this VIA, we will be able to provide these young children, who may not necessarily have the luxury and financial capability to access coding resources, have a first hand experience in coding, learning more about 21st century skills in a fun, easy and cost-free way.
We had 4 stages for the planning of the whole event.
Stage 1 was mainly about contacting and finding our target organisation. Sourcing for suitable organisations, while we started to plan on our side what we intended to do for our VIA project. We wanted to find the most compatible organisation we could work with, in order to ensure that our VIA project could be a success. Through this we hoped to be able to have a clearer understanding of our target organisation, so we will know who is the most suitable to work with, and how we can better communicate with them if we were to work together.
For this project, we already planned to teach scratch to children, so we were looking for an organisation which could work with children. After a round of searching, we decided to settle on AMK CDAC due to its proximity to our school, its availability and flexibility for us to conduct our VIA programme, and also because we wanted to be able to help less privileged children learn more about coding.
Stage 2 of our project was about contacting the organisation, finding out the details, and ironing out the full plan for our VIA project. This whole phase was mainly about the preparation for the project and ensuring clear and consistent communication with the partner organisation. Within this whole stage we worked closely with CDAC to settle the details for our project. We had to look through things like how many participants we would want to have, how many sessions were we going to hold, how long would we want each session to be, etc.
One thing which I would say is special to our year would be the Covid regulations and SMM regulations we had to take special note of when we were doing the planning of our sessions. Because of it, we had to plan the lessons with less group work, take note of the number of participants and also facilitators we had in each room, as well as arrange our seating plans in such a way that it does not violate covid-19 regulations. On our end, we had to plan what we wanted to teach the children, what were the lesson plans for each of the lessons, and how we were going to conduct each session.
At first, we planned to teach through a zoom session, but some of the constraints were that the centre did not have very strong internet to support multiple zoom sessions going on at once, and also that we found that it would be much more effective and easy for the children to understand the coding if we were there physically to assist them when they had questions. So we settled on having our club members to go there and take part in assisting the children on learning scratch physically.
However, due to the Covid regulations, we could not have too many club members in the room at the same time, so we had to split it up into 3 rooms, as well as into 3 sessions so that all of our club members could take turn to head down to CDAC to help facilitate our sessions.
For lesson planning, we wanted our lessons to be as fun and interactive as possible, so we chose to go with a less structured approach, so we could allow the children to make best use of their creativity. We planned it in such a way that we would first run through how some of the command blocks work, then we went on with giving the children a goal to achieve, and we allow them to explore the set of tools they were given, and let them explore around, using their creativity to figure out their own way towards the goal.
As for the goals to achieve and which blocks were to be taught to the children, we grouped up our members based on the rooms they were assigned to, and they got to plan what goals they wanted the children in their lesson to achieve, and what they wanted to teach the children. This way, we would be able to spark the interest of children by letting them explore freely, as well as giving our club members the liberty to decide how they would wish to facilitate their session. In each room, we had 1 teacher and at least 1 facilitator. We understood that people learn at different paces, so we decided to have some club members facilitate, so that they would be able to help those who may not be able to catch up, and allow each child to learn at their own leisure and pace.
Through this whole lesson plan, we wanted to make our session as fun, easy to understand and interactive as possible, so that the children can not only have a great time with us, but also take away valuable knowledge from our session.
Our next stage, stage 3, was about getting our club members ready for the actual VIA project.
We had to conduct training and preparation for the actual session, through ensuring the proficiency of our members on Scratch and that they have a clear understanding of methods of teaching and their expectations. Over the holiday, we told our members to read up and learn more about scratch, and to clearly understand how the blocks in scratch work, in order to programme a code. When CCA resumed, we then had a session where we tested the members on their knowledge of scratch, by having them code a simple game of pong within a given period of time. Through this short activity, we could see the proficiency of our members in scratch, and get a rough gauge on who we should assign to which teams, so that there are equal numbers of more proficient members and less proficient members in the teams for each room, so that they will be able to help one another out in facilitating the event. We also had to run checks on the logistics we had to prepare for our VIA project. One of the things we had to make sure was that the laptops we were bringing to CDAC to help facilitate the event had scratch programmes installed in them, and that the laptops were able to run these programmes smoothly. We also had to check for things like the floor plan of the classrooms, to find out things like availability of power sockets in the situation we have to charge our laptops, availability of projectors, availability of tables and chairs, etc.
Once we were all set, we moved on to stage 4, which was the actual execution of the event. These our some photos of our VIA event. One of our teachers was teaching the students how the code blocks work when they are being placed together. The children were trying to code by themselves and figure out how to make their character move about. Our facilitators were helping our students with their queries, and patiently explained how the blocks work, thus helping our students to figure out something they were previously confused with.
The children were tasked to code a simple game of pong. We first showed them how the game would work, then taught them the functions of all the blocks they may need. We also enabled them to exercise their creativity by putting together a code like the one above, to make their very own pong game.
After the event ended, I felt that personally for me it was a very eye opening experience. I really got to learn a lot through this event, such as how we could use our knowledge to help others and how to communicate effectively with young children. Our members were also deeply enlightened by the event, through the process learning how they can make use of their skills in coding to contribute to our society in a meaningful and positive way. This VIA was definitely an unforgettable experience for all of us, and had shown us how we could always lend others a helping hand, to build a more united and caring community for future generations.
CCA VIA Ambassador
CHERN CHAO QUN MIGUEL (20-I4)