The Premier’s Coding Challenge – let’s get one going

Each year NSW schools run the Premier’s Reading Challenge and the Premier’s Sporting Challenge. In fact the 2017 Sporting Challenge was launched yesterday, and it was seeing news of that launch that lead me to contemplate: There should be a Premier’s Coding Challenge.

Just like the other challenges the aim would be to get kids coding by rewarding them for going through exercises. With the Reading Challenge students read books; with Sporting they get active; with Coding they’d, you guessed it, learn to code.

All you’d need to get this running is a structured set of exercises at the right level, a log-book system to check progress, some marketing, and a bunch of certificates to reward the students with. Developing such resources on the back of the stuff available on the web as part of the Hour of Code wouldn’t take an enormous effort.

Even better would be for the Government to do a deal with the wonderful, and Sydney-based, Grok Learning which is pretty much ready-made for the task. That’d be a neat shortcut if both sides could pull it off, but there are many other ways a Coding Challenge could be mounted without a great deal of effort.

The result could be both a flagship initiative for NSW and a great way of getting even more kids into coding.

Wouldn’t that be a really great initiative to see running in schools across NSW?