In a digital society where demand for software and applications will only continue to grow, coders are quickly becoming the modern economy’s new version of coal miners, said a River Valley School teacher.
“The whole language of code, it’s going to get more and more important in the world,” said Grade 8 teacher Michael Brown.
“The amount of jobs that are available in that career right now is amazing — there’s going to be a lot more coders.”
He anticipates that coding courses will become a part of the educational curriculum before long.
Digital devices are not disappearing; rather quite the opposite as they are only becoming more common, he said, adding more and more products depend on software or programs to operate.
“Even the tractors you see these days, they’re more computers than tractors. Radar, laser, GPS guided — just push a button and it pretty much does everything for you.”
Since last fall, his class has been working on developing video games in teams of five through a program called Coding Quest, which recently culminated at a gathering at Red Deer College on Friday, April 27 when about 500 students from throughout Chinook’s Edge School Division as well as Red Deer Public Schools came out to showcase their work.
“It was great,” said Brown.
“The biggest thing was just to show them how much work is put into everything that we use every day.”
Introducing students to how much coding goes into the programs our cellphones and computers require to function not only might inspire some to pursue a career path in programming, but also help them better appreciate the technology that makes modern life possible, he said.
Even if students do not end up forging ahead to become software developers, Coding Quest helped foster and encourage crucial critical thinking as well as problem solving skills and researching information to find solutions.
“I wasn’t that good at coding at all,” Brown admits without hesitation.
So when students asked him about a problem they had encountered, he would encourage them to figure out a way to resolve the matter.
“They’d go online or just try to keep trying different ways to fix the bugs.”
Brooke Littlejohn and Caleb Richardson were among Brown’s students who participated in the coding program.
“It was fun,” said Littlejohn about the creative process. She was on a team that created a game called Pac Runner — a labyrinthine world the player must escape — which combined elements of the classic arcade game Pac Man and the more recent movie The Maze Runner.
The team Richardson worked with developed a game called Super Mario Puzzle World.
“Our main character was Mario and he had to navigate through the Mushroom Kingdom to find an artifact,” he said.
Deeply rooted in and inspired by the famous Nintendo franchise, the game was a very challenging project. Although he admits not playing a lot of video games in his spare time, Richardson said he really enjoyed the creative process behind all of the coding involved in the project.
“There was a lot of trouble-shooting and critical thinking aspects.”
Although his heart is set not on coding but rather becoming an architect, Richardson agreed the problem-solving skills he learned are undoubtedly going to come in handy.
Coding Quest, which focuses on STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — was in part made available by The Learning Partnership.
