Fourty local students from 10 primary schools nationwide were given hands-on training to produce relevant tech projects in a five-days Tech Kids Camp 2016 organised recently by the Authority for Info-communication Technology Industry of Brunei Darussalam (AITI) in collaboration with the Science, Technology and Environment Partnership (STEP) Centre, Ministry of Education, Women Techmakers powered by Google Developer Groups Brunei (GDG) and the Universiti Teknologi Brunei (UTB).

The event took place at Seri Kerna Hall, AITI.

The Tech Kids Camp was aimed to offer students the opportunity to experience the subjects applicable to programming, while providing tools to problem-solve, create, work in teams, and use critical thinking skills.

During the camp, the students from Year 4 and 5 worked as teams to develop an educational game using a simple programming tool called Scratch.

The students embraced the importance of STEM learning: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics by producing a tech project in the form of an educational game which is centred around the STEM theme.

The technical programming contents of Scratch were facilitated by Jennifer Voon from the School of Computing and Informatics, UTB.

The Tech Kids Camp was concluded with a pitching session where students pitched their tech projects to a panel of judges.

The team from St George's School came in first place with their project 'Math Kids 1'.

Coming in second place was Tungku Primary School, while Seri Mulia Sarjana School was awarded with third place.

St George's School also won a Special Award for Best Presenter, with the award for Best ICT Project going to Tungku Primary School and Cikgu Norhanani binti Haji Mohd Yusof from Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Primary School was recognised as Best Mentor.

On hand to present the prizes to the winners was Pengiran Haji Mohd Zain bin Pengiran Haji Abdul Razak, the Chief Executive Officer of AITI.

The Tech Kids Camp is one of the initiatives under 'Discover and Excite' programme identified in the National ICT Manpower Masterplan, which was launched earlier this year by the Minister of Communications.

The purpose of this programme is to allow youth and young students to experience ICT in a tangible and fun way.

AITI hopes this initiative will spur and ignite the students' interest in exploring their creativity through the use of ICT and looks forward for more collaborations with other relevant stakeholders in relation to human capacity building and youth development in ICT.

Source:
@BRUDIRECT.COM

by BruDirect.com

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