How Øhavsskolen’s pupils learned to code with Chromebooks

Øhavsskolen is a school located in Faaborg, at the south of Funen in Denmark, and for this reason the school can benefit of the great vision – in terms of innovation in education – of the municipality of Faaborg-Midtfyn. To foster the digital transformation in the classroom, the municipality of Faaborg-Midtfyn offers Acer Chromebooks to all the pupils from grade 0-10 and to all the teachers too, because they are required to use these devices as a fundamental support for their work, so they have to perfectly know how get the most out of a Chromebook.
Last year, this school was involved in the “Tivoli project”, that was a partnership between Tivoli – an amusement park situated in Copenhagen – Google and MIT. The goal of this project was to teach children in the 6^th grade how to code and program by using a special edition of Scratch, developed by MIT itself. These coding skills would then be used by the young students to write the code to set the large LED panels that were part of Tivoli’s famous Christmas lights.
Some developers from MIT came to Øhavsskolen and had all-day workshops with pupils to teach them how to use Scratch and start coding with it. Students were suddenly enthusiastic about this programme and about coding: they really appreciated the workshops with two professionals directly from MIT. With about 40 hours of training in the classroom, along with many projects done even at home, students learned very quickly to design and code.
On December 1^st, all the pupils went to Copenhagen for a day of education and fun together with the light technicians at Tivoli. The day ended by Tivoli officially turning on their Christmas lights and the pupils seeing their work come to life!