Students in the Willow Park School in Leduc and Calmar Elementary School will have opportunities to develop their robotics and coding skills, thanks to grant funding from the federally-supported Callysto program.
The schools received $5,400 from Callysto to launch their “Building Community Connections through Future Ready Skills and Robotics” initiative. Students in grades 5 and 6 will learn to program robots in the classroom and build on their coding and computational thinking skills, which will hopefully ignite their interest in further pursuing digital technologies.
“A key goal for Callysto is to help students develop their computational thinking skills,” said Byron Chu, Data Science Program Manager for Cybera, who is leading the Callysto program. “As well as learning how to code, kids today need to know how to approach problems in an analytical, almost algorithmic way. Developing these creative problem-solving skills in the younger grades will prove invaluable when they one day enter a workplace that, most likely, will rely on robotics and Artificial Intelligence.”
“On behalf of Black Gold School Division, I want to thank Callysto for their support in helping our students become future-ready as they develop their computational thinking skills through robotics and code,” said Willow Park School assistant principal Tarynne Cable. “Our school responds to the needs of many students who come from a low socio-economic environment. This grant allows them to participate in STEM opportunities they may not otherwise have had.”
“The students will begin their journey by learning coding basics to program tools such as MicroBits, robots, and other electronic systems we use in our everyday lives, while also following Alberta curriculum outcomes,” said Cable. “Students will engage in challenges using their knowledge of basic block coding and gradually move to more advanced coding using Python.”
The funding is part of a community-wide ‘call for proposals’ from Callysto, a free, online program that is helping Grades 5-12 students and teachers in Canada learn and apply in-demand data science and computational skills. The program is offered by Cybera, Alberta’s not-for-profit technology accelerator, and the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences.
Callysto is federally supported under the CanCode initiative, which is focused on building and employing new technologies that promote digital literacy, and helping Canada’s youth develop the foundational skills required to become the future drivers of innovation. For more details on the Callysto program, including its list of free, online data science learning resources, visit: Callysto.ca.