07-12-2016
Last November 26th, the FCT Coding Fest 2016 welcomed about 250 students from 10 elementary schools to a "Code Hour", a global movement that reaches tens of millions of students in more than 180 countries and aims to increase the consciousness of society about what is computer science and computer science seen as a literacy of computational thinking, thus overcoming prejudices and barriers.
But it was not just another "Code Hour." Using the Coding Fest platform, developed by the Department of Informatics of the Faculty of Science and Technology of NOVA and the NOVA LINCS Research Center, supported in the cloud and framework blocky, it was for the first time possible to put 10 schools to solve together problems, with the results aggregated by school and visualized in real time, enabling a fun and competitive environment.
During the week of December 5th to 11th, a specially adapted version of this platform is the support of the "Vamos Programar" activity of the Portuguese Code Movement (" Movimento Código Portugal "), promoted by the Government and in partnership with “Ciência Viva”. This system, of high pedagogical and social value, allows simultaneously coordinating time-of-code activities by offering them to all pre-school, primary and secondary schools in Portugal. The results can be viewed on the “Movimento Código Portugal” website in real time.
By the end of the second day of the week, students from 700 schools in Portugal had already solved 79969 problems using 531927 blocks of graphical programming. During peak hours, the Coding Fest virtual servers, hosted at Google, processed more than 50 requests / second. The platform presents many innovative aspects and allows thousands of students, identified through their school and with their teachers, the unique experience of solving original problems adapted to the first three cycles of the national education system.
The Coding Fest project was developed by an interdisciplinary team from the Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS), in collaboration with all its research groups (Computer Systems, Multimodal Systems, Software Systems and Knowledge Based Systems), and involves experts in programming, data management and cloud computing, interaction and multimedia, data analysis and visualization, design and animation.
In the project were also consulted basic education teachers and image and communication specialists, involving students in usability tests.
