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ICT Week 2018 - Students participate in Hour of Code - Seychelles |25 May 2018

As part of the events for this year’s ICT Week, students from eleven secondary schools from Mahé, Praslin and La Digue took part in the ‘Hour of Code’ event.

The ‘Hour of Code’ is a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify “coding”, to show that anybody can learn the basics of programming, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. This year is the second time the Hour of Code sessions are held within the ICT Week and each year more girls are encouraged to take part in the event.

The event, which took place at the University of Seychelles' Mont Fleuri campus, was hosted by the department of Information Communication Technology (DICT) in collaboration with Microsoft IOI, French Pacific territories, Namibia and Botswana and the Seychelles Ministry of Education and Human Resource Development.

Like every year, the theme of the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) is adopted for the ICT Week and this year the theme is ‘Enabling Positive Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for all’.

The theme aims at focusing on the potential of Artificial Intelligence to accelerate the attainment of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

In line with this year’s theme, during the one-hour coding session, students made use of the Accenture Intelligent Space Exploration tutorial to learn a bit about Artificial Intelligence - a branch in computer science that teaches computers to emulate human behaviour such as learning and problem solving. With the aid of the tutorial they had to create an intelligent robot that could explore a new planet! At the end of the one-hour each student was presented with a T-Shirt and a certificate.

This year, to boost the level of interest of the students, for the first time the students could also team up to present a group work production that would be used to participate in a coding competition.

Each school could enter this competition with one team of four students. The student would need to create a project using the ‘Scratch’ software to design an intelligent Sprite (An Avatar in Scratch). Each team had to submit a short video to introduce their team, project, and how they worked on the project. Marks were awarded based on technicality and creativity.

This year marked the 4th Celebration of ICT Week which coincides with the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) which was celebrated on Thursday May 17, 2018.

WTISD is commemorated every year to help increase awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide.

In Seychelles, the ICT Week is an occasion for the DICT to give visibility to that sector and the work it is undertaking.

 

Contributed by the DICT

 

 

 

 

 

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