Visiting Tagai Code Club
Our most northern club in Australia is Tagai Code Club, located on Thursday Island. The club started in 2022 when a class of year 6 students collaborated with our Community and Engagement Manager, Kaye, to create a Moonhack project. In the last 12 months, the club has expanded to include more classes across the school, and this year during a visit the coders were excited to learn new skills in Scratch and share their coding knowledge.
In recent cultural lessons at school, the students had been deepening their understanding of the seasons of the Torres Strait and what this tells them about the animals, plants, and weather patterns for each month of the year. Using this as a focus for a coding project, the students set to learn some new coding skills in Scratch to create a project where they could demonstrate their cultural understanding.
When brainstorming their current knowledge, it was decided that it would be best to focus on the months of May, August, and November as these were months in which a significant change in the weather occurred. From here the young people were able to pick out which animals and plants they would incorporate into their project to share information about a significant aspect of its life cycle.
Over five hours of fun many different coding projects were developed. Some projects were an animation using sprites which were hand drawn by the students and uploaded to Scratch. The month of August was most popular as students coded a crocodile (time to build a nest and lay eggs), pigeon (migrates from PNG to Australia), and crayfish (leaves the reef) in their animations to share knowledge of how the strong winds and rough seas impact the local animals.
Other projects were an interactive demonstration of knowledge whereby clicking the name of the month, the background changed (photos from Thursday Island) and the sprites shared information through speech and voice recordings. There were even some sprites created using the Scratch editor, or costumes created to add meaning to their projects.
Our coders demonstrated a deep understanding of the Torres Strait Island seasons through their projects and were able to integrate HASS, culture, and digital technology.
Mr. Richard Matthew, the language and culture teacher, played a crucial role in ensuring that the traditional knowledge of the Torres Strait seasons was not only accurate but also treated with the respect it deserved. His guidance helped students infuse their code with a deep understanding of the land, skies, and seas unique to the Torres Strait region, while also adhering to traditional protocols.
Mina big esso (thank you very much) to teachers, Mr. Tony Maen, Ms. Jodie Hartman, and Mr Richard Matthew, and the students of Tagai, for inviting Kaye for a visit and for sharing with Code Club Australia!
