The number of sessions carried out in Malta as part of EU Codeweek 2017 between October 7 and 22 was the highest per capita compared to other European countries, said Carm Cachia, executive coordinator, eSkills Malta Foundation.
During the two-week period, the eSkills Malta Foundation, as the official national ambassador of EU Codeweek, collaborated with various schools, training academies, universities, colleges and other organisations that carried out over 139 coding-related sessions. The participants were mainly young children, but some sessions were also aimed at adults.
The subjects and coding sessions held included subjects like computational thinking, interactive coding with Scratch, coding with Unity for games and Robots, Dash and Dots Robots, Angry Birds, Coding Monkeys, Coding with Ozobot, Marty the Robot, Lego WeDo2, My Town and Help Gingerbread Man.
For the older children, teenagers and adults there was coding in HTML, C#, Wordpress and Java Script.
For the ICT savvy there were introductory sessions about data engineering, programming concepts and robotic design.
This is the fifth year running that EU Codeweek has been held in Malta. Mr Cachia said the number of sessions held was a great improvement on previous years. “This was a national digital initiative that brought the Maltese together and clearly showed that with collaboration and corporate social responsibility, we can achieve much more.
“We are grateful and proud of the many organisations who helped us make this European initiative a success. They were indeed great ambassadors for digital education and an example to all other European countries. This result gives us the motivation to strive for even better results in the years to come.”
The participating organisations included the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology, the Education Ministry’s Directorate of Digital Literacy and Transversal Skills, over 60 State primary and secondary schools and colleges, Church and independent schools, the Malta National Library in collaboration with Easypeasy, Middlesex University, St Martin’s Institute of Higher Education, PwC Academy in collaboration with Creolabs, San Andrea School, St Michael’s School, St Catherine’s School in collaboration with AcrossLimits (Malta), ICE Malta and Ascent Software.
Although EU Codeweek has officially come to an end Mr Cachia said that similar coding initiatives should be held regularly and with similar intensity throughout the year.
“The importance of making people aware and knowledgeable about coding by trying it out for fun is one of the most important concepts for society. Through such initiatives we bring ideas to life with code, demystify these skills and bring motivated people together to learn,” he said.
The number of events held in Malta compared very favourably to those of countries of similar size, such as Iceland and Luxembourg.