Hello! It’s me again, Sherine. Today, I’m here to share my reflections not as a marketer, or preschool teacher (see our previous blog), but as an Escape Room host.
Look at the happy faces of our students receiving their Halloween goodie bags and 3D printed pumpkins and ghosts!
This Halloween 2022, we had a blast with our students dressing up as various characters. Some students even deliberately attended lessons on a weekend, just so they could wear their costumes! In addition to this, our popular coding Escape Rooms have returned! Our last coding escape room took place just before COVID, so we are delighted to reinstate this after a 2-year hiatus.
This year’s theme was “Potter’s Escape”. The theme revolved around the story of Harry Potter, in which the students needed to solve a series of coding challenges to escape from the dungeons of ‘He-who-must-not-be-named’. This escape room included various tasks that required computational, innovative and critical thinking. We included challenges that were beyond what the students learnt in their usual lessons. For example, the first task was: “How to think like a computer”. We gave the students a series of 0’s and 1’s (a language the computer understands) and asked them to solve the code to unlock the next stage. Not only that, we also introduced them to Python Turtle as the last and hardest task. Since most of our students (ages 7 to 10) only have experience with block programming, this was their first exposure to syntax programming.
Despite the challenges, the students were very proactive and found many different creative ways to solve the task. They were able to apply what they had learnt in class to solve the challenges. Although we had only provided a brief explanation for the Python Turtle task, they were able to grasp the concepts quickly and solve the problems before time ran out. As computational thinking is classified as one of the most valuable 21st century skills, I was pleasantly surprised to see children of this generation developing these important skills from such a young age. They have developed a curious and innovative mindset – one that is intrigued by challenging tasks, as they come up with innovative ways to solve them. With more guidance and suitable challenges, they will be able to improve their coding and computational skills in no time!
