Computer Science Week at MBIS!
For the third consecutive year, MBIS celebrated the world-wide event called the Computer Science Week and Hour of Code. This year, the activities were led by the students from the Maker, Robotics and Coding PYP ECA and MYP CCA. Those students showcased their interactive projects ranging from creating a game on Scratch, reconstructing our campus on minecraft, 3D printing, creating a virtual reality tour of our school or even navigating sphero robots.
Through their projects, students demonstrated their expertise and passion and manage to communicate their learning to their audience. They were agile, empowered and innovative by following the design cycle (brainstorming, ideating, creating and evaluating) and developed their transdisciplinary skills (especially the social skills of accepting responsibility, cooperating and adopting a variety of roles) and Approaches to Learning (in particular the social skill of collaboration and the self-management skills of organization and perseverance). The students also demonstrated they were “computational thinkers” (one of the the ISTE Standards for Students) which means that they used various strategies to solve problems in ways that leveraged the power of technology to create and test solutions.
As we reflected about the previous celebration of this event at MBIS, this year, we committed to make this a student-centered process to unleash student’s creativity and ingenuity. We were pleased to see that the students took ownership of this project and felt proud to share their skills to their peers and teachers. Some of the students shared their learning reflections after the event:
In PYP 1, Yasine and Ajay said: ‘’We made a ‘Roller coaster of doom’.We had many problems. Some places the B – bot would stop and not move. We did some thinking and more thinking. We problem solved by giving it many short cuts to finish line”.
In PYP5, Jeongmin said: “To make the product, (which was to make the whole school in Minecraft, to show visitors our school in a fun way, not just reading the website.) we needed to work together and collect knowledge of the school (How it looks like), how to play Minecraft and about the school admission email and number.We are planning to put the Minecraft world on the website after it is fully complete and we take permission”.
Aadi and Aadam (PYP5) shared: “We loved how other students saw how hard we worked and problem solved on our project . It involved a lot of critical thinking as making our school MBIS where students could swipe their cards to enter in less amount of time was very challenging. But we like challenges in tech and maker’’.
As ECA/CCA leaders, we would like to congratulate the students once again for their achievements and encourage them to continue developing and sharing their tinkering mindset!
Authors: Fanny Passeport, Arif Shaikh, Poornima Karve, Archana Karve, Sonia Pardeshi.