As part of Computer Science Education Week, West Ferris’ Brent Yacoback is teaming up with Apple Canada.
Yacoback, a teacher at the school, will be facilitating a national webinar called “Get a quick start to coding” Wednesday, between 7 pm and 8 pm. Yacoback says it’s a “quick start to coding”, and he is looking forward to walking people through Apple’s coding guide and sharing its great activities with fellow educators, and parents.
“I’m going to be sharing some of my experience, and expertise,” he said. “I’ve been working with Apple since around 2013 and I take every chance I can get to collaborate with them. This webinar is an excellent opportunity to share learnings with other teachers, and parents too, on how to use Swift Playgrounds on the iPad.”
Yacoback says he believes coding is important for students to learn early.
“I’m fortunate to be able to help run and teach the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) program at West Ferris,” said Yacoback. “Teaching that program, I get to teach science, computers and coding. For us, coding is something that’s always included in our STEAM computer classes. It’s part of the curriculum and it focuses on technology integration. We want to make sure that in that first year, we are helping them learn to use the technology, and teaching them the fundamentals and how to use it to be productive, to enhance their education so they can integrate it in other classes.”
Yacoback says it’s important for him to show students how technology and various school subjects are now all integrated.
“It’s all connected now, especially moving into the future. We’re more and more reliant on using technology in our day to day lives… personally with social media and entertainment, and especially in education now. We need to make sure we are providing our children and students with the opportunity to use the technology for education, productivity and beyond. We need to show them how learning technology in elementary school, middle school, and high school will directly relate to job skills later on in their lives.” he said.
Yacoback’s coding session is open to everybody and registration is open until later tonight.
“It’s going to provide a good introduction to getting more people into coding. It’s a free app that can also run on a Macbook. The application itself really shows how coding is readily accessible and everyone can learn. It’s not relegated to “really smart people”, which is a stereotype I hear. It’s accessible to everybody,” he finished.
If you are interested in participating, you can sign up here.
