The College introduced programming to Junior school IT curriculum over three years ago and it has been steadily developed over that time. Our students are currently learning Kudo in Grade 2, Scratch! in Grade 3 and 4, Snap! in Grade 5, and Python in higher grades.
From the beginning of this project it had always been the plan to introduce electronics, robotics and IoT (Internet of Things) in to the Grades 5 and above. After a couple of false starts with finding donors, Covid-19, and the lack of availability of equipment, this year we are finally able to get started on the next phase of the project.
On Tuesday, 2nd March our Junior and Middle School IT teachers had their first workshop using Arduino boards and S4A (Scratch for Arduino) programming. They will be given more workshops to develop their knowledge on hardware programming in order to teach this subject to our students.
The workshop was conducted by three students from the Faculty of Engineering at Peradeniya University. We are pleased to note that all three – Rahal Nanayakkara, Insaf Ismath and Gavishta Liyanage – are Trinitians from the 2016 batch.
The training was organised Dr Asitha Bandaranayake from the university’s Department of Computer Engineering. He has been instrumental in helping to introduce these additional topics to the Junior and Middle school IT syllabus over the past three years.
