Teachers Major Participants In ‘Coding In Schools’ Programme

The Ministry of Education’s ‘Coding in Schools’ programme continues to gain traction, with teachers now being trained in coding.

A total of 15,000 teachers will be trained to deliver the curriculum to students up to grade 9, under a ‘Train the Trainer’ programme.

In an interview with JIS News, Minister of Education and Youth, Hon. Fayval Williams, explained that the training of teachers in coding is another aspect of the Ministry’s overarching goal of strengthening the education sector’s online learning framework.

“The results were good. It showed that our students like what they were doing and want to continue, but we also want to get the teachers in on it, and actually, we started with a cohort of our teachers to teach them coding,” she informed.

Mrs. Williams said even as teachers and students have returned to the in-person learning environment, the Ministry will continue its thrust to incorporate greater use of technology in the classroom.

“Getting our teachers more aware of the technology and more comfortable with it means that there will be greater interaction and greater use of the technology in class, and even outside of class they will continue to engage with students on the online platform, which we will still maintain going forward,” the Minister informed.

Launched officially by Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Andrew Holness, in November last year, the ‘Coding in Schools’ initiative will benefit a total of 400,000 students from grades 1 to 13 in public schools across Jamaica.

It follows a successful pilot, which was conducted virtually in 20 schools with approximately 2,000 students in grades 4 and 9.

The objective of the programme is to equip students with the technological competencies for the demands of the future labour market.

Coding is the process of creating instructions for computers using programming language.