Schools have been closed for several weeks now… Students are at home and the teachers must get to them. How? With distance learning! Here the emergency turns into an opportunity. Digital tools become means to reach students and support them in a moment of dismay and confusion.

Nothing can ever replace human contacts, smiles, hugs, but we are not alone. We are an educating Community, all together in a network built by schools and families.

The teachers are committed to carrying on the educational dialogue. As reference adults, they are called to fill in a void, to replace a routine with a constant presence behind a computer screen. The students themselves share intimacy, trouble, and warmth from their homes, with teachers.

Our forced isolation has transformed the points of view, the wishes, the priorities, creating the basis for reviewing the teaching in a radical way. In fact, through digital teaching, new connections, and ways of learning with ITC have been established, but above all, national online learning is home to an emotional revolution. Schools became human-digital.

A human-digital school is made up of disheveled students who, just woke up, went to the computer for the first-morning lesson. It is a school made up of teachers who had never had an interest in technology, but who have rolled up their sleeves for the good and future of their pupils. It is a school made up of Head Teachers who took care of everyone’s anxieties and concerns, putting aside their own. It is a school, addicted to slow changes, which has suddenly changed very fast.

There are lots of difficulties and differences between schools and Countries. Some teachers had already experimented and acquired new methodologies and a STEM approach to content and teaching method. Now, distance learning has become the cornerstone for everyone to put in place useful tech tools to allow participation and good practices.

Habits have changed, classes have become virtual and everyone is trying to reconstruct a tiring daily life, that is full of doubts and uncertainties. The main one is: how long the lockdown will last? No one knows and we need to go on with our activities the best way we can. Coding helped us to fill in the gap. We developed many games that are playable online with a computer or a smartphone. One of them, a sort of treasure hunt, is inspired by Trivial Pursuit and all quizzes. The questions are about coding and programming linked to other subjects.

In Trivial Coding, the challenges are different, from CodyRoby to CodyColor, from Pacman to Who wants to be a Millionaire, with a focus on algorithms and not missing Scratch.

In each step, you can click on a link or scan the QR code and try to solve the relevant quiz. If you succeed, you will get a letter. If you find all the letters, solving all the parts, you can guess the keyword and you will be the winner.

This game has been proposed also in our e-Twinning project Coding to save the Planet, used also as an example of partnership by being able to play together. Students from all over Europe enjoyed, had fun, and learned with it.

This was our way of trying to, at the same time, take the edge off and to reflect on the common issue. We hope that, when back, our classrooms will be filled with the feeling of support and collaboration of learned during the crisis days.

Enjoy our treasure hunt: https://view.genial.ly/5e5e3b4f82b5130fe33547bb/game-interactive-coding-treasure-hunt

Author: Stefania Altieri, Scientix Ambassador

Featured photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash – See Licence

Tags: coding, collaboration, Human-digital, Online Teaching