Lilit Petrosyan
Boundaries? Let’s Break Them
Today’s world is completely submerged into digital experiences with
the trendy newsmaker – artificial intelligence shaping our tomorrow.
Controlling home appliances with a simple voice command or making
investments in self-driving cars are not abstracts from science fiction
any longer. This is the reality we all live in, and it would be naive to
fall behind the tech innovation flow.
Four of the Luys Scholars from UC Berkeley and Stanford University
believe that Armenia has a huge potential for not only catching up with
the world’s digital innovations but also for being the creators of its
future. With PicsArt, Shadowmatic, Instigate, and Synopsis in the
Armenian tech portfolio, the enormity of the tech power speaks for
itself.
“Children are going to learn not only how to work on the computer but
also how the computer works. Ultimately, they are going to make the
computer work for them,” says Hayk Tepanyan, a Computer Science major at
Stanford University.
This is a very ambitious and challenging project, however, Hayk and
his teammates are convinced that the project’s long-term outcomes are
going to be groundbreaking in a number of ways.
“This is another way for the “Chess Empire” to stand out with an
innovative approach – being amongst the first countries in the world to
provide a state-wide computer science training in public schools,” says
Hayk.
Catching Up With The Innovation Flow
Integrating programming in the school curriculum is certainly an
international trend: Canada, Australia, Finland and a number of other
countries are shifting the school’s focus from teaching software
programs towards computer coding, or in other words from learning how to
create Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations towards learning
how those programs work.
The UK’s model, in particular, is very inspiring. Roughly four years
ago, the UK Education advocates got convinced that their school’s
computer literacy curriculum was outdated and irrelevant for modern-day
technical standards and future employment. Together with such tech
giants as Microsoft and Google, the British developed a new coding
curriculum and starting from September 2014, schools across the UK
replaced the subject of Information and Communication Technology with
Computing, one of the key components of the subject being the teaching
of coding in the classroom.
Today the British children, as young as five years old, talk about
algorithms and debugging. They now have a chance to model their very own
computer games that they so much like to play.
Dreaming Big: Gargar’s Case Study
“I wish we had coding classes at school. I’d create programs to
support our army if I were a developer,” says an eight-year-old Mushegh
from Gargar’s secondary school.
During the summer of 2016, the “Code for Armenia” project initiators
and a number of other Luys mentors and mentees gathered together in
Gargar, a small village in Lori region, Armenia. They planned to
transform the secondary school of Gargar into a real coding hub. For
almost two weeks, school children from the grades two to five started
learning the basics of computer programming.
“Every three children were supervised by one instructor which helped
foster comprehension and keep up the learning motivation,” says Hayk,
“We were surprised to monitor how quickly and ardently the children were
passing the assignments. They maintained the same level of intensive
focus throughout the course despite its vigorousness.”
The coding curriculum of the course was designed in an interactive
fun way, with lots of outdoor activities, gaming and visual art elements
which particularly helped children focus on learning and smart thinking
while also having fun.
“My favourite part of the project was working on the computer. I
would like to have coding classes at least twice a week, like we do for
other subjects in school, mathematics, for example,” says a ten-year-old
Borik from the summer training program, “I wish our school at least had
a coding lab where we can create some interesting projects. I want to
build robots, that’s what I like doing the most,” continues an
eight-year-old Mane.
The training was constructed on the educational material of code.org,
an online coding platform with hundreds of programming videos and other
valuable materials, Aside from learning, the team wanted the children
to create their own projects so the instructors largely focused on
developing creative skills. Within a very short period, the children
were able to draw their very own patterns using their coding skills.
“The training was a great success,” says Hayk, “It gained such
popularity that the size of the class doubled in a course of a week. The
children were amazed how a couple of code lines could create the
animation they had projected.”
The pilot project in Gargar gave a big flow of observations and
enhancement ideas to the Luys Scholars. They were able to gauge the
scaling opportunities of the project and are currently reaching out to
partners and volunteers for a wide-ranging roadmap.
Building the Roadmap to Something Better
The Luys Scholars have already held a couple of preliminary meetings
with public and private parties for advice and insight. Levon Mkrtchyan,
the Minister of Education and Sciences, overall has expressed a very
positive outlook on the project and acknowledged the urgency of having
enhanced quality computer literacy throughout the country. The
importance of shifting from computer literacy towards programming
literacy in Armenia is particularly accentuated by the economic state of
the landlocked state where the human potential and brain power have
always been its major resources. The project, along with its long-term
socio-economic impact, is also closely related to the national security
and education development strategies.
In fact, lots of Armenian professionals share the same ideas about
having enhanced computer science courses in public schools. Among many
others, the Luys Scholars have met with Yervand Zoryan (Chief Architect
at Synopsys), Karen Vardanyan (CEO of the Union of Information
Technology Enterprises), Vahan Shakaryan (Director of Technology and
Science Dynamics Inc/Armtab Technologies) and Vahagn Poghosyan
(Co-founder of Instigate). They all cheer the thrilling idea of Luys
Scholars and are very positive about a successful cooperation and
implementation.
The team is particularly envisioning a partnership with the UITE. The
latter is continuously creating engineering labs in public schools
throughout Armenia within the “Armath” engineering lab project.
Annually, the UITE creates more than 300 labs in all the regions, and by
2019 (Armenia will host the World Tech Forum) the number of
laboratories is aimed to reach 1,200. It is truly remarkable that the
computer programs and systems used in those labs are operating in
Armenian and even the equipment, like 3D printers, minicomputers, and
robotics kits are all produced in Armenia.
“We’re first targeting to launch the coding project as an
after-school class to make our first observations before scaling it,”
says Hayk, “The best part is that to kick-start the project we do not
need an extensive teacher training or production of academic textbooks.
Code.org has an excellent educational database and an open source
teacher training that are easily adjustable to any course length or
level of competence. Translating those materials is, perhaps, the
greatest challenge at the moment and we’re continually recruiting
volunteers to help us with that.”
Even though the ultimate goal of the program is to create a quality
tech workforce for the development of high-tech industry in Armenia,
the Luys Scholars are convinced that programming skills are interwoven
into multiple other disciplines and professions. By learning how to
code, children get a better chance to think creatively and get empowered
to build their own. It’s a long-term “investment” into developing
logical thinking professionals in their ultimate careers. In fact, the
experience of different economies of the world shows that with every new
workplace created in the tech sector, six-seven new other workplaces
are created in the adjacent sectors. Thus, similar to chess,
teaching how to code in schools is all about building a character and
not necessarily breeding engineers.
"Asbarez," November 23, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment