This past year-and-a-half, the pandemic has revamped the face of the education system in our country. Teacher-student interaction, pedagogy, examinations, assessments and extra curricular activities have seen many changes since March 2020. While opportunities have been lost, many new ones have also been created.
Today we are launching the eighth edition of the Code to Learn competition as an opportunity to immerse students in creative and computational thinking, along with building their skills in programming.
Students from Class 5 to 12 from any school in India are invited to register through their parents or teachers to show their coding genius using exciting tools like Scratch, App Inventor and Google AutoML. They can build games, animations, Android apps and their own machine learning applications; without writing even a single line of code!
The National Education Policy 2020 has also recommended introducing coding and computational thinking at a young age to allow early exposure to technology and create new pathways for our students. The Code to Learn competition provides an interactive platform for students to learn the basics of coding and build a stronger foundation in Computer Science. In a fun and engaging way, we aim to inspire students to use technology to solve problems around them.
The competition registrations are now open and parents, teachers or legal guardians can register on behalf of the student on the competition website (g.co/codetolearn). Students from across India can submit their projects until 25 October 2021. We also have online resources available on our website to learn Scratch, AppInventor and Google Cloud AutoML to get started.
The contest calls for projects on Scratch or App Inventor from students of classes 5-10, and projects on Google Cloud AutoML from students of classes 9-12. We have a special AI track for class 9-12 students where they can use Google’s existing Machine Learning models to create projects with a problem statement and a data set of their choice. Students define a problem and select any open dataset or create their own (images or text) and train a pre-trained machine learning model to create their own Machine Learning application using Google Cloud AutoML.
The Code to Learn competition in 2020 witnessed an overwhelming participation of students from across the country with innovative and exciting projects. We saw interesting entries of numerous games to fight against the coronavirus, social evils, zombies and applications to promote mental health and track fitness. In the Artificial Intelligence theme, we received excellent projects where students sought to detect the right way of wearing a mask, promote tiger conservation and decode sign languages, among various other such projects.
Code to Learn is co-organized by Google Cloud, ACM India, CS Pathshala and Indian Institute of Science (IISc). ACM is the worldwide society for scientific and educational computing with an aim to advance Computer Science both as a science (through CS Pathshala) and as a profession. IISc is a renowned research-oriented university based in Bangalore, pioneering fundamental and applied research in science and engineering.
We are very excited about this year's competition, and are looking forward to seeing the innovation and creativity that students will present to us via their projects! For more details, visit our website: g.co/codetolearn.
Posted by Divy Thakkar, Research and Education Program Manager, and Ashwani Sharma, Senior Program Manager