What is a coding bag?

It's a bag for kindergarten kids, consisting of tools to use in activities.

Sevgi Kindergarten, which is located in Ankara, Turkıye has made a start for its kids to learn algorythms and such related notion and it has continued to be an Erasmus+ Project. We have found our cooperators from Czechia, Portugal and Greece who are kindergarten teachers themselves and began working on the project. The main focus is to gather essential material for the future coding bag. Moreover, the material should have been

. easy to use

. cheap

. resistant

. available for every child

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MY CODING BAG WITHOUT A COMPUTER!

The emergence of the idea of the project:

Computer and coding concepts have a very important place in 21st century skills. In many countries, coding education is mandatory and important for all individuals, just like reading and writing. From this perspective, the importance of teaching these skills from the pre-school period has been seen and research has begun to be carried out in this direction. In recent years, many studies have been carried out on this subject in Turkey and it is intended to be integrated into education.

As Sevgi Kindergarten, while trying to provide these 21st century skills to our students, the problem that we encountered with the lack of sufficient technological tools led us to research how to provide coding education in different ways. We tried to diversify our practices and follow innovations by following the research in our country. During this period, we started to follow many international practices and research. This is how we learned about Codeweek events and participated for the first time in 2021. In addition, at the end of the event, we applied 2 separate surveys to teachers and students in order to determine the problem areas that our teachers and students encountered while implementing these activities and to improve ourselves in this regard, through the studies we carried out in our own institution.

As a result of the surveys; while participants agreed that coding activities supported children's cognitive development and analytical thinking skills, we found that only 30% of teachers could prepare activities without using resources. In this process, we had the opportunity to examine the work of institutions and schools from different countries and different socio-economic conditions. With these investigations, we saw that different applications are made in different countries and that different and creative applications are used in each country depending on the socio-economic situation and the development level in the field of technology/science.

Based on this, it was decided to enrich our robotics and coding practices by examining and sharing good practices in different countries. It is envisaged that working with transnational partners will create a good resource that others can access by sharing the pool of best examples selected from partner countries, developing their vision for each partner and contributing to the European Union.

Goal of the project:

High-quality early childhood education is the right of every child and is necessary to improve the conditions of disadvantaged children. The goals of our project, which aims to improve the coding skills, digital competencies and cognitive thinking skills of students from disadvantaged groups, starting from early childhood, are as follows:

1. Children who have difficulty accessing computer technologies due to socio-economic reasons should have preliminary preparation and basic skills until they reach these tools.

  2. Developing skills that will help children understand coding

3. The results we aim to achieve in line with the preparation of a rich resource created by bringing together good examples for teachers and the schools to be used in coding teaching are as follows:

• Preparation of a coding bag designed using good examples from each country,

  • Creating an activity resource of good practice examples for teachers working in different socio-cultural and economic conditions,

• Preparation of a handbook compiled from good practices carried out by partners,

  • Raising awareness about environmental awareness among students, teachers and parents with coded toys that will be created using recycled materials in applications without computers,

• Increasing coding awareness in children,

- Developing students' digital and analytical thinking skills from early childhood. What are the activities of the organization in this field of application?

  • Participation was made in the "Robotics and Coding (Basic Level) Training Course organized by our Ministry in 2021.

• School-wide participation was achieved in the EU Code Week event, which was organized to make coding and digital literacy fun and interesting for children.

 Within the scope of Codeweek events, our practices and work as Sevgi Kindergarten were awarded with the "Certificate of Excellence". It is aimed to raise parents' awareness on this issue by sharing general information about our participation, our certificate of excellence and robotic coding on our school's website.

• An online training was organized on 24.03.2022 by an instructor from the MEB R&D Unit on "Robotic Coding Training in Early Childhood", which our teachers requested for the trainings to be organized by our school within the scope of Capital Teacher Workshops. In the training, the robotic coding algorithm is mentioned and application examples are given.

• On 20.03.2023, in order to strengthen and support our project, our teachers took the "Game-Based Block coding" course, improving their own competencies and entering the digital part of coding.

• On 17.05.2023, we held the "Sevgi Kindergarten Coding Festival ", which we promised in our project, in our school garden. Our festival was open to our school's students and parents, as well as the people of our district and their preschool children, and various coding games and activities were carried out with the participating children and their families. Thus, a contribution was made to the dissemination efforts of the project. In this context, project hats prepared by our school were gifted to the participants.

• On 06.06.2023, a stand was opened in the program titled "Lifelong Learning" organized by our district national education directorate in the district center, open to the public. Here, we aimed to disseminate our project by having children practice coding using various paper, waste materials and toys.