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My first interaction with Turtle Stitch was at Scratch Conference 2017 in Bordeaux, Paris where I (together with the She Codes for Change team) met Susan, and by then we were looking for innovative ways to teach innovation and creative thinking to the girls in our programs here in Tanzania. Therefore we put together an evening program at the She Codes for Change office where High school, out-of-school and working class girls and boys could come and learn how to code. The aim of this pilot phase was
- to bring together a groups in our community to learn and work with TurtleStitch
- to empower girls' creativity and confidence with coding skills and to introduce boys to stitching
- to build on the already existing Turtle Stitch training curricular by testing it out in our environment.
My classroom in Tanzania did activities similar to Susan's class and we managed to coordinate video conference calls to share experience and skills between the students. This helped us understand that different application of Turtle Stitch, different cultures and patterns from these cultures and also created a sense of oneness among the students who always looked forward to sharing their work during the classroom activities.
The curricula was taught in the following ways;
1. Coding exervices with Turtle Stitch platform
2. Printing and hand stitching with paper, thread and needles
For the first pilot we launched a design competition called Design4Kanga Challenge that focused on coding Tanzania Kanga designs using Turtle Stitch. For the second pilot phase we hope to involve different educators from around the world to share various designs from their cultures and have everyone participating.
Educator: Simon Mtabazi
Email: mtabazi@hotmail.com
Twitter: @mtabazisimon
Website: ScratchEd Meetup Profile
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