During the school holidays, the CS4HS team lead my Dr Cruz Izu hosted the 2nd Workshop on Digital Technologies. 63 teachers from a wide range of primary and high schools attended this free 2-day professional training event which explored the Digital Technologies learning area.The workshop provided many hands-on experiences on Algorithms, Programming, Computational Thinking and Digital Systems

On the first day Dr. Amali Weerasinghe introduced Algorithms and how to describe them with flowcharts. After morning tea A/Prof Katrina Falkner delivered the talk “Creating our Future with Digital Technologies”, Dr Brad Alexander introduced Processing to high school teachers while Cruz ran a parallel session for primary/middle school teachers on Pencilcode. The afternoon was dedicated to Computational Thinking using the questions from the Bebras Challenge.

On the second day, Jason Plunkett from Mt. Gambier High School described the experience of year 11 students learning Python with the Scribble2 robot. Joachim Cohen from Intel Austrlaia Outreach introduced the Intel Galileo (an arduino board), and Brenton O’Brien from Microbic ran multiple workshops on Edison, a Lego compatible, $50 robot. In addition teachers also had opportunities to play with the CS4HS lending library resources including the Lego NXT robots, makey makeys, Littlebits workshop set and Dash and Dot robots.

All hands-on sessions were well supported by undergraduate students Katrina Le, Sean Marciniak, Zachary Forman and Taran Furnell and by postgraduate students Gabriel Maicas and Matt Hart.

Thanks to Google for sponsoring this event.