Code Week Europe 2017 at InfoSphere

In the week from October 9 to 13 workshops in the context of the Code Week Europe 2017 took place at InfoSphere – Computer Science Students’ Lab at RWTH Aachen University – for children from third to sixth grade.

During the two-hour-workshops, running under the theme “The Internet”, the children learned about several aspects of computer science with special focus on internet and programming. The pupils had the chance to choose one of five stations every day. Hence, children participating on more than one day had the chance to extend their knowledge on stations or select new ones.

Two stations mainly dealt with the internet and its structure. The children learned about the different nodes of a network and about the right behavior in the world wide web. Computers transform every piece of data into binary numbers. Therefore, children on one station learned basics about the binary system, for example how to transform a decimal number into a binary one.

The last two stations were the highlights of the week. One station dealt with the software “ScratchJR”, with which the children were able to develop various games and videos. Here, the children instantly saw the results of their work, which heavily increased their motivation.

At other stations, children hat the opportuninty to develop an own HTML-website. Although the topic was tough for children in that age, they did very well and numerous funny websites were created. Under the following link, some of them can be looked at.