Blog Article

• Takeflite
• Posted Nov 23, 2016

Takeflite in the Community with Weekly Kids Coding Club

With global headlines exclaiming on the shortage of women in the tech and software industry our Chief Technology Officer, Ben Chartrand, has been doing his part to help change the shape of the industry by encouraging and supporting his daughter to explore her current interest in the tech and in particular coding. Through this time with his daughter Ben saw the need to help other school students and, with teacher Stacey Mew, has donated Wednesday lunch hours for the last 12 months to lead and educate the next generation of coders and show other young girls and boys at school that coding is cool!

Discovery School Porirua were extremely supportive of Ben’s wish to teach and show the real-life day to day applications of coding while also having fun! Year 5 - 8 students learnt how to use Scratch, HTML and Python. They also worked on hardware-based projects such as the use of Makey Makey boards to create their own “Operation” game, dancing mBots, Raspberry Pi with Minecraft and simple electronic circuits.

Last week students that participated in the Code Club worked busily behind the scenes to put together a presentation for their assembly showing the school what they had been learning, live demos of games they had built and their Makey Makey board project.

Seeing the excitement and passion coming from the next generation of coders during the year and their assembly presentation was a career highlight for Ben and something he hopes will have a positive future impact for each student.

Ben plans to hold the Weekly Coding Club again with his daughter in 2017 and start to work closer with the school to complement the learning that is happening within the classroom with real-life coding applications – such as building presentations through code and learning coordinates in maths via code.

Ben Chartrand is the Chief Technology Officer for Takeflite and one of the driving forces behind our technology selection, future technology research and product development.