The inaugural Saint Kentigern Coding Camp made excellent use of the various working spaces in the newly opened Goodfellow Centre. Organised by TIC Robotics, Mrs Cristina Triantafilo-Rabie, 17 students from the College and Boys’ and Girls’ Schools gathered together for a weekend of collaboration, exchanging ideas and problem solving to advance their coding skills. The camp began with a brainstorming session on agile management, led by parent, Mr Vincent Dirks. The principles of agile management are focusing on communication rather than procedures, cooperation, and flexibility. These concepts set the platform for the way the students would navigate through the activities during the camp, giving them new ways of tackling problems as well as enhancing their programming knowledge. 

Activities designed to help the students get to know one another were followed by planning of the projects they wanted to complete over the weekend. Students deciding the direction of their learning meant the camp was tailored to everyone’s interests and the coding areas they wanted to improve in. It also identified each member’s strengths that they could share with their fellow students. Once the projects were finalised, roles were assigned and the students got to work in small groups and individually, utilising the various zones of the Goodfellow Centre and equipment such as the whiteboard tables to note their ideas and workings.

The College and Boys’ School have both achieved success at robotics competitions and the Girls’ School engineering laboratory is rapidly developing its students’ robotics skills. Accordingly, robotics made up a significant part of the camp as the students worked in teams to program increasingly difficult code for their robots.

The camp was a great opportunity for students from all Saint Kentigern campuses to share their passion for coding. The level of knowledge demonstrated bodes well for our entries into robotics competitions this year and in the future! 

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