18th CKY issue

Hour of Code Workshop
"Hour of Code Hong Kong" is an organisation that offers free one hour coding workshops
to everyone, to prove that coding is not as challenging as it may seem. Through the
lessons, students would also be able to take away important coding concepts so they can
apply them to their daily lives in the future. Since last year, our school has partnered with
Hour of Code, City University of Hong Kong to arrange scratch workshops for CKY Year
4-5 students, aiming to popularise STEM education in our school.
Personally, prior to this Hour of Code workshop, I have only had very little
experience in coding and was worried that I wouldn’t understand what
was being taught. However, after attending the workshop, I have realised
that coding is not as difficult as I thought. In fact, it can be easy and more
importantly, fun! The workshop was very interesting, as it used the “drag
and drop” programming language called Scratch to teach me how to
communicate with the computer. I only needed to give simple instructions
to perform particular functions. Even though I failed many times, I could
repeat the exercise and learn from my mistakes until I produced the result
that I was looking for. At the end, I managed to create a game, which was
very rewarding after an hour of hard work. Now, I’m addicted to it!
If I am going to make a program on Scratch again, I will spend more time
doing the exercises, think thoroughly on what I want to achieve, explore
Scratch more deeply, find a buddy like my brother to discuss and finally
have FUN!
Tiffany Leung 5B
After learning about coding, I was fascinated by the unlimited possibilities
brought up by programming. Therefore, when I was given this opportunity as a
student trainer in Hour of Code, I felt that it is necessary to promote coding at
school, and would like to contribute to the development of STEM education.
We began by planning the content of the workshop and creating workshop
resources, which was much harder than what I had expected, as we had to
design a game that is fun, easy to follow, and involve various fundamental
coding concepts all at the same time. We had to scrap our original ideas
multiple times and design easy solutions for any exploits or glitches in our
game. Although we had encountered some unexpected issues while teaching
and became increasingly nervous, the workshop went rather successfully, and
the positive feedback from the participants really brought up a sense of
accomplishment. By the end of this workshop, not only had we taught the
participants about the basic ideas of coding through Scratch, but we as
trainers also took this opportunity to consolidate our computational thinking
and teaching skills.
Walter Kwong 11C
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