Last week, on the 25th, 26th and 28th of September, I had a lot of fun running the first coding course for the Urdd’s Cardiff Residential Course.

The Urdd is a national Welsh language youth club, that works alongside schools throughout Wales to put on extra-curricular activities for children through the medium of Welsh. They run three residential courses throughout the year - the Llangrannog and Glan-llyn residential courses are full of active, sporty and outdoors activities; while the Cardiff residential course is usually full of cultural activities. This year, because of the coronavirus restrictions, they needed to find alternative activities that would work on-line - and I was asked to run a coding course.

I’ve already designed two coding courses: a series of videos with the Coleg Cymraeg, and an MSc module. But there were two new challenges this time: running the whole thing remotely over Zoom, and teaching it to school children! It needed to be “fun”.

So, with a lot of help from Ceren Roberts from the Urdd’s Cardiff Residential Course, here’s the course. We held three two hour workshops, over Zoom, with every child using Google Colab to write and run the code. Google Colab was amazing, a free cloud service for Jupyter Notebooks (including pip), which works exactly like the rest of Google Docs. The workshops were:

  • Workshop 1: Drawing pictures using ColabTurtle. The aim was to recreate the boat picture below, and at the same time practice using Google Colab, practice writing and running code, and start to think algorithmically.
  • Workshop 2: Complete exercises on numerical variables, string variables, repetition using for-loops, and conditions using if-statements. Even though it sounds like quite a lot of stuff here for just two hours, the exercises were simple enough and they all built up to the final workshop.
  • Workshop 3: Cyphering and De-cyphering codes. Using the concepts from the previous workshop, I gave them the code to run a Caesar cypher. The exercises were to use this code, adapt the code to de-cypher messages, and adapt it to perform a Vigenère cypher.

(OK, yes the Vigenère cypher was difficult!)

There was 16 children altogether, aged between 11 and 15, and we used “breakout rooms” on Zoom so that I could speak to everyone personally without interrupting too many of the others. Another intention was to have the children talk to one another and help each other. However the children were young, and came from different schools, so they were a little too shy to be able to do this, and I had some good feedback saying that that breakout rooms of pairs of children would work better. Despite this running the course over Zoom worked really well!

I was so impressed with how every one of the children reacted and worked through the workshops. And of course, after only six hours I don’t expect them to be able to fully understand the ideas and be independent coders. But that wasn’t the point! The point was to give a taste of a different subject and have a little fun through the Welsh language during these odd times. And I think it was a success.

The workshops are available here.