New Delhi: Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Thursday launched a CODE-A-THON campaign under which students of government schools will learn coding.
“We started coding project in January this year in collaboration with SheCodes foundation where 870 girl students have been given training till now. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to make it online. Now, we envision this programme to become even bigger,” Sisodia said at the launch of the campaign at Veer Savarkar Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, Kalkaji, Hindustan Times (HT) reported.
Six students presented their animated videos. They had made these from scratch on their smartphones on various topics such as ‘good touch-bad touch’, ‘saving the environment’, ‘beti padhao, beti bachao’ and public awareness about the coronavirus, among others.
“Steve Jobs once said coding is the new generation’s liberal art. It is not about programming, designing, or creating some videos, it is about creating art. Coding helps you to think, that is why it is important to learn to code. Today, I could see how it is enabling our school children to start thinking. There was a girl who made a video on early childhood marriage where she mentioned that the girl was helpless,” Sisowas quoted as saying.
“While watching the video a thought crossed my mind that now she will not be helpless, she will be able to code. We endeavour to make coding a language so accessible that can be used on a day-to-day basis, like Hindi, English or any other language,” he added.
As part of the CODE-A-THON campaign, students will go through self-learning modules on coding and will get an opportunity to practise it. They will take part in various quizzes and based on that, they will jump to the next level. There will be a grand finale in December where students will get an opportunity to showcase their projects, the report added.