Programming Week: Experience in creating project school teams

In October 2017, among schoolchildren of secondary schools of the Kaluga, Tambov and Voronezh regions, a competition of projects “Laboratory of Ideas” was held. The competition was held as part of the European Few Programming and Youth Initiative of Meet and Code.

Each schoolboy could submit a project, talk about his idea related to programming or robotics. At the end of October, the first stage of the competition ended - the selection of applications and a preliminary assessment of the projects.

“When we planned the project, we proceeded from two problems. Firstly, in our opinion, the most important thing is to teach children not just to do something, but to plan their activities from the task to implementation. ” Anna Komarova, competition organizer

“Laboratory of ideas is the first experience of formulating the problem by the children by practically without the participation of teachers. At the moment, all projects, in our opinion, need quite strong refinement, but all details and corrections will be made by the participants themselves during training and work with experts. ” Alexander Zudkin, organizer of the competition

Design teams of the Tarus secondary school No. 1 named after the competition were invited to the second stage of the competition. M.G. Efremov and the Catherine branch of the Nikiforovsk secondary school No. 1.

Proposed projects

• The “project generator” application is a web card on which projects created by users are noted. When pressing the icon, you can get a description of the project and contact its author. Thanks to geolocation, you can see which projects are implemented nearby.
• The “Programming from scratch” application allows you to learn the most popular programming languages ​​from scratch and reach an advanced level. The application provides a system of ratings and achievements for users and there is an opportunity to participate in level programming tournaments with other users.
• Web portal to provide access to information on all circles and events of the city. Contains the functions of registering for events and conducting online payments per circles.
• A telegram-boot for school students will allow you to receive relevant information about the school schedule. Since changes in the schedule occur regularly, many students and teachers often do not have time to track them. An automatic bot that monitors changes will become useful for everyone who uses the schedule.

The next stage of the project “Laboratory of Ideas” will be an expert assessment of school team projects. For authors of projects that have been highly appreciated by experts, a visit to the DigitalFest festival is planned. All participants will recommend online programming courses that will help to implement command projects.

The partner in the organization of the competition "Laboratory of Ideas" was the school No. 1 of the city of Tarusa. Evaluation of the projects is attended by employees of Yandex , the GIS department and research of the Greenpeace of Russia , NEXTGIS , participants in the Teacher for Russia project, the organizers of the Kosmodis design platform and other experts.