Students at the Nipissing-Parry Sound Catholic District School Board (NPSC) have been taking part in a unique festive activity called NPSC’s 12 Blocks of Christmas. The competition is open to all students from Kindergarten to Grade 8, with the challenge of completing one coding activity per school day. 

Students enter the competition by engaging in the board’s curated coding activities throughout the 12 school days of the challenge offering. Activities centre around core curriculum topics and are divided by grade level.

“It is really amazing to see how quickly students begin to understand complex coding concepts and programming language,” explains Peter Anello, Technology-Enabled Learning Facilitator at NPSC. “We have students as young as JK learning algorithms by programming robots to do basic commands and functions,” he adds.

Students learn to code using various programs supported by NPSC, including a program called Scratch.

“We were learning to code using Scratch,” says Tessa Shago, a Grade 6 student at St. Hubert School. “We had to try to write a code to make our SuperHero fly around and also to make a beetle draw! It was a very interesting and cool experience,” she says.

Anello says the beauty of a program like Scratch is that sometimes students don’t even realize that they are writing code. 

“Block coding, which is a ‘drag and drop’ learning tool used by programs like Scratch, provides a great foundation for computational thinking,” he says. “While supporting curriculum concepts, learning to code in this way encourages students to develop their resilience as they ‘debug’ their programs if their code doesn’t perform the way they expected it to. Sometimes, their ‘mistakes’ end up being some of the best parts of the learning,” he adds.

NPSC’s 12 Blocks of Christmas will continue until this Thursday, December 17. Winners of the contest will walk away with educational resources including Lego sets, Spheros, Microbits and more.