Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Thursday launched a CODE-A-THON campaign which would benefit over 12,000 government students in Delhi. This was possible because of the collaborative efforts between HT Codeathon and Delhi government, Sisodia said. The Delhi government has encouraged coding programmes for female students and to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), the scale of engagement is wider this time, said Sisodia who also stressed on the importance of coding, on why students should learn coding and the role of Codeathon in the new era digital economy.
"We started a coding project in January this year in collaboration with SheCodes foundation where 870 girl students have been given training till now. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to make it online. Now, we envision this programme to become even bigger," Mr Sisodia said at the launch of the campaign at Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, Kalkaji.
At the launch event, six students presented their animated videos which they made from scratch on their smartphones on various topics such as 'good touch-bad touch', 'saving the environment', 'Beti padhao, Beti Bachao' and public awareness about the coronavirus, among others.
"Steve Jobs once said coding is the new generations' liberal art. It is not about programming, designing, or creating some videos, it is about creating art. Coding helps you to think, that is why it is important to learn to code. Today, I could see how it is enabling our school children to start thinking. There was a girl who made a video on early childhood marriage where she mentioned that the girl was helpless," Mr Sisodia said.
Sisodia added, "While watching the video a thought crossed my mind that now she will not be helpless, she will be able to code. We endeavour to make coding a language so accessible that can be used on a day-to-day basis, like Hindi, English or any other language.”
Sisodia further said that it is the responsibility of the government to encourage their people to do new things and the Delhi government wanted to teach kids about new-age technology. But when the Kejriwal government came to power in 2015, classrooms were damaged and infrastructure needed a lot of work. Since then, they have been consistently working toward improving infrastructure and have done extensive teacher training programmes. Results in Delhi government schools have reached 98%, and now we want to work in the future.
Talking about the curriculum, Sisodia said that in coding and programming, visualising and thinking is equally important. To get success, children must be given space to learn things at their own pace. ‘We can’t have a rigid syllabus for it. So, learning should focus on embedding coding with languages or subjects like history and mathematics.’
It will be a challenge to introduce government school students to coding, as these students are not familiar with any technological gadgets. To provide the students with devices is a challenge as the government does not have the revenue now due to the Covid-19 lockdown. But eventually, we can get revenue to invest in this, added Sisodia.
Mentioning the importance of technology, Sisodia said,” modern technology is a part of education now and not just taught as a subject. Introducing it in the early stage of education makes a student sharp. Technology should be embedded in the learning environment and children should be able to learn coding in a creative manner. Once, while on a visit to a school in a foreign country, I saw a group of students working on a play on tax reform laws that were going on in the country at that time. This shows embedded learning. The students weren’t taught about the reforms through rote learning in classes. The way we adopted liberal arts, we have to adopt coding. Through this bigger experiment with HT Codeathon, involving thousands of students, a greater atmosphere of learning coding will be developed in government schools.”