NFMU's Tech Day Camp

4/11/2018

The Americas, Guyana, Bygeval Secondary, Mahaicony, Guyana

The National Frequency Management Unit in collaboration with the University of Guyana held a three day tech camp at Bygeval Secondary School. The camp was conducted from 11^th April, 2018 to 13^th April, 2018. Each session lasted for 3 hours from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. Students from 3^rd and 4^th from were present in the training.

Bygeval Secondary was selected for the tech camp because they were participants of the pilot Guyana Girls Can Code programming club in 2016 and were recipients of Raspberry Pi Starter Kits from the National Frequency Management Unit in 2017.

The camp focused on introducing students to basic programming using the BBC Micro Bit and the Raspberry Pi. Students were familiarized to the programming using programming blocks with languages such as Scratch and Micro Bit Code.

Students were exposed to activities using the Micro Bit which allowed them to program a thermometer, create a sensor based light, program a touch arpeggiator using everyday fruits and a create a moisture content detector. Using the Raspberry Pi and scratch the students were able to create animated games, movies and story books.  Also the students were able to understand how small affordable devices such as the Raspberry Pi could work as a fully functional computer.

It was found that introducing students to programming using the Raspberry Pi and Micro Bit removed the abstraction of coding and made it more hands on. These hands on approach sparked interest immediately with students who were able to quickly grasp concepts such as conditional statements and loops.  Students wanted to do more exercises and experimented on their own with different ways of problem solving.

On the first day of the tech only four of the fifteen students present were interested in doing Information Technology as a subject for CXC, however, on the final day all the students present were seriously considering doing Information Technology. Based on the response from the students and the work covered this tech camp is considered a success. To encourage further development of skills the students who participated were each promised Micro Bits.