We believe in engaging children to be thinkers and creators through hands-on and project-based learning. It is increasingly recommended that coding is an essential skill for everyone – not just people who aspire to be programmers and computer scientists. This is because it teaches computational thinking, which knows no age limit. Computational thinking is about solving problems efficiently, by breaking them down into more manageable pieces. It also includes learning abstraction, seeing the larger picture from minute details.
We have designed a curriculum that introduces computational thinking at an age-appropriate level. This is accomplished through Scratch, a visual programming language specifically designed for younger users by MIT Media Lab. Scratch has a child-friendly, colourful, drag-and-drop interface that makes programming more intuitive for younger learners.
After mastering the basics of Scratch, we encourage our students to explore the limits of their imagination. They’ll be tasked with their first-ever hackathon, where they have to put together characters and functions to create games, stories or animations of their choice.
Plenty of guidance is given, but we encourage students to debug their codes themselves so that every opportunity to learn is seized. As we also believe in ownership, we encourage our students to present their final projects to the class at the end of every module. After all, they should take pride in every line of code they write.
The beauty of our curriculum is not what language we choose to introduce, but the rigorous practice of problem-solving. This also involves creativity, in dreaming up original solutions, and the determination to follow through on a coding project. These perseverance and logical skills are fundamental to all coding languages, and indeed, in life!
Lynette loves her Scratch 1, 2 and Advanced. There is a need to code. There is a need to compute and put in the logic for actions to take place and determining the actions. Behind each automation, there is a lot of coding.
My daughter has just completed her Scratch 1 course. She absolutely enjoyed the classes and was excited to share with us what she has learnt and what she can do. She is looking forward to her Scratch 2 classes.
