CodeAthon: Improve the game … and play in Scratch!

Code programming initiative for students aged 8-16, as part of the European Programming Week Europe Code Week 2019

CodeAthon returns as part of the European Programming Week Europe Code Week 2019! After its successful first event in 2018, this year CodeAthon is expanding geographically and at the end of October 2019 it will travel to 6 cities: Athens – Thessaloniki – Ioannina – Xanthi – Patras – Trikala.

CodeAthon is organized by STEM Education as part of the European Programming Week Europe Code Week 2019, in collaboration with WRO Hellas and with Strategic Partner COSMOTE. The event will be implemented with the support of Google, with the co-organization of the Municipality of Trikala and the Hellenic Open University (EAP) and with the hosting of OTEAcademy. As part of CodeAthon, free teacher training seminars will be offered in scratch programming.

What is CodeAthon

CodeAthon is a non-competitive educational and entertaining activity and is aimed at children aged 8-16 formed in groups of 2-3, accompanied and guided by an adult (teacher, parent, etc.).CodeAthon’s goal is to encourage students to take a creative approach to programming, while developing their programming skills and learning to work as a team.The teams participating in CodeAthon have to:

• To study a programming problem in Scratch (MIT University development programming environment)
• Look for ways and solutions to improve this problem and
• To present their solutions (if they wish to)

The projects will be published on the STEM Education website (for as many teams as they wish to).

At the same time, as part of their participation in CodeAthon, the coaches (teachers, parents, etc.) will be able to attend free seminars on Scratch programming.

The educational material that students will use

• Scratch program (download here)
• Representation of the program in CodOrama ( download here)
• Presentations of educational scenarios (download here)

The proposed material is based on “Teaching Scenarios in Visual Planning Environments with Tiles” (An. Ladias, G. Papadopoulos, D.Fotiadis), an educational package of 25 teaching scenarios in Scratch with topics from robotics, aimed at introducing Software EngineeringThe material of the series has been hosted since December 2014 in the community of “Teaching Scenarios in Visual Planning Environments with Tiles” on the Open Discovery Space (ODS) platform that is part of the general research and innovation actions promoted by the Ministry of Education (Prot. No. 192096 / Δ2, 26-11-2014). The material was produced as part of the ODS program.

To help you guide your students in the best way, we suggest that you follow and  apply the following exemplary course plans:

• Scenario 1 (See it here)
• Scenario 2 (See it here)
• Scenario 3 (See it here)
• Scenario 4 (See it here)

Rules

On CodeAthon Day, teams will bring their laptops with them to work. Students will have four hours to modify / enrich the program, which virtually simulates the behavior of a robot that collects objects and places them in appropriate places.To do this, teams can either implement the ideas they came up with during the month of preparation, or improvise on the spot, under the guidance of STEM Education associates who will give them specific problems to solve.

Will they be winners?
Yes, play and learning!

CodeAthon is non-competitive. Its purpose is purely educational and entertaining. During CodeAthon, the programs of some of the groups will be presented live, if they wish to.Correspondingly, after the completion of CodeAthon, the projects of all the teamss will be posted publicly (along with their description and code, as well as the details of the team members, if they wish to ) and will be part of a repository free for all.