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Friday, December 1, 2023

Nancy Shiba Primary School joined Microsoft Minecraft Hour of Code

While many students were anticipating the last day of final exams on November 22, 2023, Nancy Shiba Primary School grade 5 and 6 students virtually participated in the Microsoft Africa Minecraft Hour of Code event to learn about Artificial Intelligence(AI) through the Minecraft Coding game and Scratch Coding.

Ms. Nomusa Keninda, eLearning Specialist and Founder of the Mpumalanga ICT Club, and Ms Samukelisiwe Hlomuka from J Kananda Primary School, an award winner for the ICT in Education with Ms Beyanca Struwig of Microsoft South Africa, carefully arranged the event. This event is part of the global celebration of the Hour of Code, in which learners are exposed to computer science education through the use of code.org resources to teach Coding and Robotics in schools.

“We were learning too, because AI is a new technology that is starting to affect all of us” according to Keninda. We discovered that AI still has many biases. In one of the exercises given, the AI robot did not recognize the diversity of learners who were receiving food from the AI robot, which was supposed to serve learners, because some learners were shorter and had darker complexion than what the AI was programmed to detect. During the exercises, students observed how to debug the AI software to accept diversity and inclusiveness.

 Samukelisiwe Hlomuka

When Ms Hlomuka inquired if they were familiar with the coding game, one child replied, “I know about Minecraft because I play it on my phone.” What was most intriguing about Minecraft in this session was that the learners were given the option to create their own game by coding it from start rather than consuming computer games.

Following the Minecraft AI class, learners had fun creating their own game using the Scratch Coding environment. The pleasure of having a tablet on their desks was demonstrated by their brave listening during the coding sessions as they followed instructions led by Keninda and Hlomuka. Other classes were taught by Glenda Maselesele and Duduzile Mashinini who are Tangible Africa coding evangelists.

“Since I came from America on a leadership and Mentorship program, I can see there is a lot of demand for learners to learn computer science, I can relate from what I learnt from San Francisco.” Keninda stated.

 Published by Witbank News on  01 December 2023

 

 

 

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