August 9, 2019 PINO NETWORK NEWSLETTER
On a beautiful August morning Code School Finland’s teacher Sirkku hopped on a train in Oulu and travelled to Tampere to teach Chinese children coding and robotics. This coding camp was organized by Sumino Oy which helps to build cross-cultural business activities between European countries and China.
There were 12 kids who were 9-12 years old and they came from XiaoMa.Wang coding school in Hangzhou. Hangzhou has been twinned with the City of Oulu since 2010.
Kids previous experience with coding was with Scratch and Python so we were able to offer them something new by introducing micro:bits and Maqueen robots. Of course the Finnish style of teaching was also new experience for them!
Besides learning coding they also wanted to learn English so all the teaching was done in English with only occasionally translating the instructions in Chinese. Language barrier caused some missed jokes but it didn’t prevent the kids from learning or having fun.
The whole week went smoothly and cooperation between Code School Finland and Sumino was very pleasant according to Xu Zheng from Sumino.
The teachers who accompanied the children were interested in seeing how coding is taught in Finland. They said that one of the differences is that in China children move on from graphical programming environments to textual programming languages much earlier than in Finland.
Code School Finland offers a digital library of programming and robotics teaching materials for K-12 and after school markets. The library supports teachers and schools in offering interdisciplinary, collaborative project-based learning. Materials provide multi-disciplinary projects that integrate coding and robotics with other subjects such as arts, science and math.
Code School Finland is a member of PINO Network – Exporting Finnish Education.