How to conduct the “Hour Code”: Kazakhstan experience
The code hour is a global initiative, an hour-long introduction to programming right in the school lesson, designed to dispel the myths about the complexity of coding and show that everyone can learn its basics. Last year, for the first time, our company initiated and conducted an Hour Code at the national level, together with two ministries, and covered 75,000 schoolchildren throughout Kazakhstan from about 2,000 schools (this is actually one out of every four in the country).
Disclaimer: the material will be practically useful for those who want to spend an Hour of the Code at the level of a region or city, and rather just busy for everyone else.
Why am I writing this stuff? - because Hour Code 2016 is already on the nose and it will take place in the week from December 5 to December 11, which means that the time for preparation is nothing, and later it will probably be irrelevant to do something. On the other hand, “for a month” is just about the period for which we began to prepare last year. Answering the question “how did it go?” I still honestly answer that “I never drank so much redbull.” But I will try to tell everything in order, at the same time giving my personal advice on what you should pay attention to and what you shouldn’t do.
')
We knew about the Hour of the Code in 2014, but then we were busy looking more for the first customers and just came in a couple of large companies with an offer to spend an Hour of Code for the children of employees. Spent it purely on code.org . The guys liked it. They were then 7-8 people.
In 2015, we remembered the Hour Code sometime in November and thought seriously about how to make an event at the national level. Such a scope is equally frightening and embarrassing vanity with a new frontier. By a logical first step, we studied the experience of Russia, as our closest neighbor, where the Hour of the Code was somehow conducted earlier . And at the same time they realized that in order to achieve coverage, we need an administrative resource, since without it the task would immediately become overwhelming. What do I mean by administrative resource? - This is a letter from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan to schools where it would be recommended to conduct a lesson. Immediately there was a question - how to get such support? I think in our case - we were very lucky, because we were recommended to contact a person from the adjacent ministry who literally half an hour later on my letter about “let's do it?” Answered “a great idea, what do we need from us?”. Looking ahead, I will say that it was he who helped us in the future to reach the Ministry of Education and the Minister himself.
Conclusion 1: find the right contact, which will accelerate the involvement of the state on your side. Perhaps it is not so easy, but vital. There are almost 8,000 schools in Kazakhstan with almost 2 million children. To attract them all on our own - we certainly could not.
Conclusion 2: ask for administrative support, not money. For example, we spoke 90% only of the fact that we needed a “letter for schools” and a “video with the minister”, which greatly accelerated the process, since it did not require a lot of approvals related to money.
Enlisting the support of the state, we moved to the second stage: we had to adapt the code.org materials. Adaptation was in three main areas: first, we wanted not to give a whole lesson of exercises from the site (code.org), but to draw up a lesson plan, including the presentation of the topic, and a small discussion, and the exercises themselves; secondly, it was necessary to translate a lot of materials into Kazakh; thirdly, we understood perfectly well that not all schools have Internet, and even where there is - often the number of computers is insufficient or the Internet connection is extremely slow, so we needed a lesson plan that you can do without computers at all.
In this part of the surprises, to be honest, there wasn’t much, and the difficulty was due to the extremely short preparation time. We developed a toolkit, which included a lesson plan, painted to the minute. For the version without computers, they chose to play a “robot”, where one of the participants performed the role of a robot, which, according to instructions written by members of his team, had to assemble a cup design (the game, by the way, was perceived very well), while understanding algorithmic.
In addition, we made a presentation for teachers, where it was told what the Hour Code is, what needs to be prepared for the lesson, and so on. Well, then they translated it all into Kazakh.
Conclusion 3: the perfect solution was to put all the materials on the site, as the teachers could go in there and download everything, but we did not need to add attachments to the letters.
Conclusion 4: we very much underestimated the number of questions that the teachers had, because everywhere my number was indicated, which ended up calling me 10-20 teachers a day with a whole set of questions - on what should be the characteristics of computers and to the question "will we receive a certificate?". Just the same hell was going on in the mail - a huge number of letters were pouring in, which was extremely difficult to process quickly. Here, a good solution may be to attract volunteers, who at least a little will remove the burden of communication from you and allow you to do something else.
Conclusion 5: you need to prepare for a low teaching level. For example, in our instructions it was not spelled out in detail how to switch the language of the site or do something else that we, by default, rated as "that is simple." But not every informatics teacher is digital native, so materials are better prepared for the “low level” so that they are clearly understood by everyone.
Conclusion 6: no matter what - you need a certificate! For us, this was a surprise, but the pieces of paper - in price. Almost every third teacher asked us if they would give him a certificate after the event. We didn’t have any certificates, so we ended up giving everyone a blank where you could write your name (sent as pdf-ki to emails), but you really thought about automation.
The mechanics of our work with schools was as follows: the ministry appointed a person responsible for the project, who, in turn, appointed regional responsible (16 people - by the number of areas). After that we wrote to all 16 that we need a list of school directors of their emails - to duplicate the communication about the Hour Code. I myself still ask myself the question - why the ministry itself cannot do it, but the state paths are not always linear, so we decided to double-check.
The first challenge was the fact of collection, because, despite the fact that we gave a very clear format in which we wanted to see data (xls, with certain columns), we sent lists in completely different formats - from Word to PDF, which is very greatly complicates the subsequent work.
We encountered the second problem when we started to make an informational mailing: a lot of addresses were either incorrectly written (starting from innocently missed @ and ending with just addresses that apparently were once attached to domains that are no longer working now).
What we did was that even the addresses at which the messages went were in many cases inactively used. And the director simply could not see your letter, as he checks mail once a week. Or even started it for show. And all the ee.
Conclusion 7: Take the time to find the best way to communicate with directors / computer scientists. Otherwise - get ready for a lot of manual work.
Working with schools is good, but we also wanted to bite the initiative among a wide range of participants, and here you won't get by without good partners.
With whom we managed to work - first of all, these are the guys from code.org - who always openly answered our questions about what data we can get, where to start, and so on. We asked them to add us to the section of official partners and they also sent photos from the event.
In addition, we managed to enlist the support of Microsoft Kazakhstan, which helped us greatly from the financial and clothing point of view, paying for the printing of certificates for participants, stickers, balls and other items, as well as taking an active part in campaigns to schools and orphanages.
At the last moment, we were also supported by one of the large grids of Meloman bookstores (they are generally close to the Moscow “Republic”). We came to the guys almost at random, having read the news that the Hour of the Code was supported by Apple and now it will be possible to pass the Hour of the Code in the stores of the company. Why not do this with us? - we thought. And they did. :)
Conclusion 8: it is better to look for partners in advance. Companies are often large and have a large planning horizon. So it’s not necessary to count on much, having arrived 10 days before the event with a request for money or something else.
Honestly - all that concerns marketing, we have somewhat failed. Well, maybe not so hard, but it could have been done much better.
Of assets we had a site. But more functional than marketing. We had a description of the project on the site, the teachers downloaded all the materials there, and the students were registered there.
I’ll do a little bit of this: the code.org policy is such that they don’t collect almost any data about their users. And it was important for us to understand the teachers from which regions participate, from which schools they are and for how many years, and by what sex their students. That is why the registration was transferred to our site, and after filling out the form of participants redirected to the website of the Kodorg.
But we will continue. In the Kodorg tradition, we understood that an important element of the campaign is video. We decided to copy the approach of the very first and most popular video . To do this, compiled a list of local successful IT entrepreneurs, diluting it with the children and members of our team.
I didn’t know the entrepreneurs well then, so the invitation format was to write on Facebook, hoping for a response. I was surprisingly lucky and many agreed :) The Challenge here was that not all the participants were in the same city and had to shoot them in different ones. Moreover, we managed to agree on the record of the minister, however, the number of approvals for it in the end was off scale - starting from coordinating the shooting time and ending with agreeing on what would end up in the final video.
Media in 2015 we almost did not attract. Why? - just did not have the strength, time and focus. There was a press release, but there was no active promotion.
Conclusion 9: making a video - hire / find professional operators. We did everything ourselves and spent a lot of time, but it could have been faster and better. Video is essentially your business card and it should be good!
Conclusion 10: think about the press in advance. It may be worth holding a press conference on this topic in order to gather more stakeholders.
Conclusion 11: attract partners. Try to work with a PR agency on this project on a pro bono basis. This approach was offered to us by colleagues from the UK when we communicated with them after the Hour Code. This allows you to save your resources, and the agency to make contacts, and get the best result.
I missed the execution phase. But this is because there is only one lerning in it - to be always in touch. So that you can get through and ask any question.
In general, our Hour Code stretched out in time, because there were many schools that were part of the classes not spent at 1 week, but for 2 weeks. For various reasons, they learned late, did not have time to work with all the classes or something else.
After the initiative, all teachers had to send us a report in the form of 2-5 photos. To be honest - we were surprised in many ways by the results, because we understood from them that:
- Regionals more appreciated the event than the residents of the capital, as they have the least held and they appreciate it more;
- Not only adult teachers, but also children wrote enthusiastic reviews to us. They asked - what to do next and where to learn.
- there are many applications for training in our school of programming from the regions.
Conclusion 12: think over the next step. At one Hour Code, life does not end, and it is important to understand that you offer your lighted participants as the next logical step after the event.
Conclusion 13: write down your own Lernings. What worked well and what needs to be done differently. After the event, we made a large list with the whole team, which is now in our folder and we looked at it first of all when we started preparing for the Hour of 2016 Code.
That's all. And good luck to all of us this year Hour Code!
Disclaimer: the material will be practically useful for those who want to spend an Hour of the Code at the level of a region or city, and rather just busy for everyone else.
Why am I writing this stuff? - because Hour Code 2016 is already on the nose and it will take place in the week from December 5 to December 11, which means that the time for preparation is nothing, and later it will probably be irrelevant to do something. On the other hand, “for a month” is just about the period for which we began to prepare last year. Answering the question “how did it go?” I still honestly answer that “I never drank so much redbull.” But I will try to tell everything in order, at the same time giving my personal advice on what you should pay attention to and what you shouldn’t do.
')
Prelude
We knew about the Hour of the Code in 2014, but then we were busy looking more for the first customers and just came in a couple of large companies with an offer to spend an Hour of Code for the children of employees. Spent it purely on code.org . The guys liked it. They were then 7-8 people.
Phase One: organizational political
In 2015, we remembered the Hour Code sometime in November and thought seriously about how to make an event at the national level. Such a scope is equally frightening and embarrassing vanity with a new frontier. By a logical first step, we studied the experience of Russia, as our closest neighbor, where the Hour of the Code was somehow conducted earlier . And at the same time they realized that in order to achieve coverage, we need an administrative resource, since without it the task would immediately become overwhelming. What do I mean by administrative resource? - This is a letter from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan to schools where it would be recommended to conduct a lesson. Immediately there was a question - how to get such support? I think in our case - we were very lucky, because we were recommended to contact a person from the adjacent ministry who literally half an hour later on my letter about “let's do it?” Answered “a great idea, what do we need from us?”. Looking ahead, I will say that it was he who helped us in the future to reach the Ministry of Education and the Minister himself.
Conclusion 1: find the right contact, which will accelerate the involvement of the state on your side. Perhaps it is not so easy, but vital. There are almost 8,000 schools in Kazakhstan with almost 2 million children. To attract them all on our own - we certainly could not.
Conclusion 2: ask for administrative support, not money. For example, we spoke 90% only of the fact that we needed a “letter for schools” and a “video with the minister”, which greatly accelerated the process, since it did not require a lot of approvals related to money.
Phase Two: Adaptation of Materials
Enlisting the support of the state, we moved to the second stage: we had to adapt the code.org materials. Adaptation was in three main areas: first, we wanted not to give a whole lesson of exercises from the site (code.org), but to draw up a lesson plan, including the presentation of the topic, and a small discussion, and the exercises themselves; secondly, it was necessary to translate a lot of materials into Kazakh; thirdly, we understood perfectly well that not all schools have Internet, and even where there is - often the number of computers is insufficient or the Internet connection is extremely slow, so we needed a lesson plan that you can do without computers at all.
In this part of the surprises, to be honest, there wasn’t much, and the difficulty was due to the extremely short preparation time. We developed a toolkit, which included a lesson plan, painted to the minute. For the version without computers, they chose to play a “robot”, where one of the participants performed the role of a robot, which, according to instructions written by members of his team, had to assemble a cup design (the game, by the way, was perceived very well), while understanding algorithmic.
In addition, we made a presentation for teachers, where it was told what the Hour Code is, what needs to be prepared for the lesson, and so on. Well, then they translated it all into Kazakh.
Conclusion 3: the perfect solution was to put all the materials on the site, as the teachers could go in there and download everything, but we did not need to add attachments to the letters.
Conclusion 4: we very much underestimated the number of questions that the teachers had, because everywhere my number was indicated, which ended up calling me 10-20 teachers a day with a whole set of questions - on what should be the characteristics of computers and to the question "will we receive a certificate?". Just the same hell was going on in the mail - a huge number of letters were pouring in, which was extremely difficult to process quickly. Here, a good solution may be to attract volunteers, who at least a little will remove the burden of communication from you and allow you to do something else.
Conclusion 5: you need to prepare for a low teaching level. For example, in our instructions it was not spelled out in detail how to switch the language of the site or do something else that we, by default, rated as "that is simple." But not every informatics teacher is digital native, so materials are better prepared for the “low level” so that they are clearly understood by everyone.
Conclusion 6: no matter what - you need a certificate! For us, this was a surprise, but the pieces of paper - in price. Almost every third teacher asked us if they would give him a certificate after the event. We didn’t have any certificates, so we ended up giving everyone a blank where you could write your name (sent as pdf-ki to emails), but you really thought about automation.
Phase Three: Work with Schools
The mechanics of our work with schools was as follows: the ministry appointed a person responsible for the project, who, in turn, appointed regional responsible (16 people - by the number of areas). After that we wrote to all 16 that we need a list of school directors of their emails - to duplicate the communication about the Hour Code. I myself still ask myself the question - why the ministry itself cannot do it, but the state paths are not always linear, so we decided to double-check.
The first challenge was the fact of collection, because, despite the fact that we gave a very clear format in which we wanted to see data (xls, with certain columns), we sent lists in completely different formats - from Word to PDF, which is very greatly complicates the subsequent work.
We encountered the second problem when we started to make an informational mailing: a lot of addresses were either incorrectly written (starting from innocently missed @ and ending with just addresses that apparently were once attached to domains that are no longer working now).
What we did was that even the addresses at which the messages went were in many cases inactively used. And the director simply could not see your letter, as he checks mail once a week. Or even started it for show. And all the ee.
Conclusion 7: Take the time to find the best way to communicate with directors / computer scientists. Otherwise - get ready for a lot of manual work.
Phase Four: Attracting Partners and Companions
Working with schools is good, but we also wanted to bite the initiative among a wide range of participants, and here you won't get by without good partners.
With whom we managed to work - first of all, these are the guys from code.org - who always openly answered our questions about what data we can get, where to start, and so on. We asked them to add us to the section of official partners and they also sent photos from the event.
In addition, we managed to enlist the support of Microsoft Kazakhstan, which helped us greatly from the financial and clothing point of view, paying for the printing of certificates for participants, stickers, balls and other items, as well as taking an active part in campaigns to schools and orphanages.
At the last moment, we were also supported by one of the large grids of Meloman bookstores (they are generally close to the Moscow “Republic”). We came to the guys almost at random, having read the news that the Hour of the Code was supported by Apple and now it will be possible to pass the Hour of the Code in the stores of the company. Why not do this with us? - we thought. And they did. :)
Conclusion 8: it is better to look for partners in advance. Companies are often large and have a large planning horizon. So it’s not necessary to count on much, having arrived 10 days before the event with a request for money or something else.
Phase Five: Marketing Support Initiatives
Honestly - all that concerns marketing, we have somewhat failed. Well, maybe not so hard, but it could have been done much better.
Of assets we had a site. But more functional than marketing. We had a description of the project on the site, the teachers downloaded all the materials there, and the students were registered there.
I’ll do a little bit of this: the code.org policy is such that they don’t collect almost any data about their users. And it was important for us to understand the teachers from which regions participate, from which schools they are and for how many years, and by what sex their students. That is why the registration was transferred to our site, and after filling out the form of participants redirected to the website of the Kodorg.
But we will continue. In the Kodorg tradition, we understood that an important element of the campaign is video. We decided to copy the approach of the very first and most popular video . To do this, compiled a list of local successful IT entrepreneurs, diluting it with the children and members of our team.
I didn’t know the entrepreneurs well then, so the invitation format was to write on Facebook, hoping for a response. I was surprisingly lucky and many agreed :) The Challenge here was that not all the participants were in the same city and had to shoot them in different ones. Moreover, we managed to agree on the record of the minister, however, the number of approvals for it in the end was off scale - starting from coordinating the shooting time and ending with agreeing on what would end up in the final video.
Media in 2015 we almost did not attract. Why? - just did not have the strength, time and focus. There was a press release, but there was no active promotion.
Conclusion 9: making a video - hire / find professional operators. We did everything ourselves and spent a lot of time, but it could have been faster and better. Video is essentially your business card and it should be good!
Conclusion 10: think about the press in advance. It may be worth holding a press conference on this topic in order to gather more stakeholders.
Conclusion 11: attract partners. Try to work with a PR agency on this project on a pro bono basis. This approach was offered to us by colleagues from the UK when we communicated with them after the Hour Code. This allows you to save your resources, and the agency to make contacts, and get the best result.
Phase Six: Post Effect and Closure
I missed the execution phase. But this is because there is only one lerning in it - to be always in touch. So that you can get through and ask any question.
In general, our Hour Code stretched out in time, because there were many schools that were part of the classes not spent at 1 week, but for 2 weeks. For various reasons, they learned late, did not have time to work with all the classes or something else.
After the initiative, all teachers had to send us a report in the form of 2-5 photos. To be honest - we were surprised in many ways by the results, because we understood from them that:
- Regionals more appreciated the event than the residents of the capital, as they have the least held and they appreciate it more;
- Not only adult teachers, but also children wrote enthusiastic reviews to us. They asked - what to do next and where to learn.
- there are many applications for training in our school of programming from the regions.
Conclusion 12: think over the next step. At one Hour Code, life does not end, and it is important to understand that you offer your lighted participants as the next logical step after the event.
Conclusion 13: write down your own Lernings. What worked well and what needs to be done differently. After the event, we made a large list with the whole team, which is now in our folder and we looked at it first of all when we started preparing for the Hour of 2016 Code.
That's all. And good luck to all of us this year Hour Code!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/314950/
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