Hi everyone!

I am really excited to announce that in STEM, we are starting the topic coding! I am really excited for this topic and can’t wait to get right into it. I started to code 2 years ago when I was in year 5 (age 9-10), when our class was introduced to code.org, I didn’t really know anything about coding, but I learned quickly. The next year ( year 6 aged 10-11) I was involved in the Grok coding competition I competed in the blocky and python categories. Later that year, we were introduced to Thomas the NAO robot. We all learned how to code and interact with him. Towards the end of the year, I went back to Grok and did the microbit challenge and then took a break from coding. This year I am re-familiarising with the world of code as I am starting to code once again.

This week was our first lesson and we were asked to reflect on our capability to code, there were four categories that we had to sort ourselves into and they were: Novices, apprentices, practitioners and academics/experts. At first I didn’t quite know where to put myself as I thought I was in between a practitioner and an academic/expert. I didn’t know what to expect from both those groups but I thought just incase the academic/expert category was too advanced I went to the practitioner category. We then recorded keywords on our group whiteboard, our words were similar to blocky, code, choreograph and language. After, we were given time to look at the other whiteboards, I went to the academic/expert board to have a look at what was on there and I felt confused as there were not many keywords.

After, we were showed a video of some successful people that had created/designed apps, websites and games. Some of them had started learning learning code at university and some, from a young age. The video was inspiring and encouraged me to work hard and accomplish new things.

Until next time

print(‘Olivia is signing out’)