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.
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.
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