Entire school coded for Mandela

Written by Cindy Preller

August 2023

An entire school of 1 000 learners participated in the Mandela Day Coding Tournament hosted in July.

Forming part of 16 000 learners across the continent and abroad, learners from Grade 8 to Grade 12 at Motjedi Senior Secondary School in Tafelberg near Groblersdal competed against each other by playing TANKS.

Very little online resources are needed to play these coding games, by making use of Tangible Africa’s flagship coding applications, RANGERS, BOATS and TANKS. Tangible Africa is an engagement project of the Nelson Mandela University Computing Sciences Department and the Leva Foundation.

As one of the 500 schools participating in the Tangible Africa Mandela Day event, this high school in Limpopo is a pioneer for the region when it comes to the early adoption of coding in the classroom and beyond.

Mr Samuel Sithole, the ICT teacher at Motjedi, was one of 17000 teachers across South Africa who were trained between June and September last year in tangible coding by Tangible Africa and SADTU. This collaboration between the teacher unions and Tangible Africa allowed for teachers to implement tangible coding in their classrooms.

However, after returning to his school with just four tokens, Mr Sithole not only taught the learners at his school, but also other teachers how to facilitate and play the tangible coding games.

“Our learners were some of the first in the region to finish all the levels of TANKS. Other schools invited me to assist them in training their teachers last year and in Term 1 this year we hosted our first workshop for the cluster, and we are planning another district workshop in Term 3,” said Sithole.

He said it was easy to train teachers, who may at first be sceptical about the technology, but once they realised, they only need a smart phone – a device they use every day – and coding tokens they become almost as excited as when they start playing and completing the different levels of the games.

At Motjedi over 34 teachers are now trained in unplugged tangible coding and they assisted Sithole in facilitating the various groups of learners in the school on Mandela Day.

“We live in a rural area and what has really blown me away is how the parents have welcomed and adopted coding. Many of them have even bought phones for their children, since we play the coding games by children bringing their own devices and sharing it in groups,” said Sithole, who also recently received a national teaching award for promoting ICT in the region.

While a target was set to reach 10 000 learners across 70 sites in Africa and abroad with the event, this target was surpassed with a total of 16?000 learners who participated in the event.

Themed “Cultivating the coding ecosystem of the future” participating African countries included Ghana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, and in Europe Ireland and Germany coded for Mandela.?

We congratulate Mr Sithole for obtaining first position in the 23rd National Teaching Awards in Sekhukhune South District; Excellence in Technology-Enhanced, Teaching and Learning. This is well deserved!