Hyderabad: The Telangana Information Technology Association (TITA) successfully conducted a six-day pilot training on introducing coding skills at the school level. During the six-day training, TITA members trained 54 participants from 18 government schools in Makthal constituency of Wanaparthy district.
These participants represent the Innovation Clubs at the school. One teacher and two students, one each from Class VIII and IX from these clubs are trained now.
These resource persons, who are termed as Telangana Early Coders, will turn mentors to teach coding to select students at their respective schools from January 17. The training will go on for two weeks. TITA will make a report on its observations on this pilot and submit it to the State Government on in February first week.
This pilot project is in line with suggestions made by IT Minister KT Rama Rao on the need to expose students to coding skills. The State Government is thinking to offer coding at school level to inculcate problem solving skills among students and also orient them to entrepreneurial possibilities as they evolve.
Coding at schools is a joint initiative of the Departments of Education and ITe&C. TITA has partnered with State Government to do the pilot.
In the six-day training that began on January 6, TITA members have exposed students and teachers in programming in Scratch and Python and also coding without the use of computer using ProGame. The pilot enabled students, who earlier were not even exposed to computers, to create games on their own.
They also designed and executed apple & ball game and rocket launcher using Scratch. They also devised a calculator, a quiz and a dice game using Python language.
On Sunday, the last day of training, a test was conducted to assess their learning. All the participants have passed the test and scored an average mark of 91%. The organisers put 40 per cent as a threshold to declare the pass.
Once the training begins post vacations, one TITA member will oversee four schools for the remainder of the pilot project. The event is to go on till Feb 1 and TITA will submit the report to the Government on Feb 3, said TITA Global President Sundeep Kumar Makthala.
The students showed great promise and if they are trained properly on coding they can be on a par with engineering graduates, he said. The six day programme training happened in Makthal constituency covering Atmakur and Amarchintha mandals in Wanaparthy district.
Atmakur and Amarachinta MEO Bhaskar Singh lauded the effort of TITA members in imparting training in coding. He lauded the efforts of teachers who made it to the module.
TITA thanked MV Raman School Chairman and MPP Sridhar Goud for hosting the training at school. TITA will provide laptops for a month for students to train under the programme and it will bear the costs, said Makthala.
TITA members Nanda Kumar, Razeem, Shravan, Sajid, Nehmed, Sameer and Winks representatives Vinay, Amar, Sai, Venkateshwarlu aided in the training. (INN)