CodyRoby turns 10!

In 1014, in a brain storming meeting, a gathering to invent ideas, between Alessandro Bogliolo of EU CODE WEEK (the European week for the promotion of coding) and some people from Scuola di Robotica, came, to Alessandro, the idea of uniting coding and robotics. Alessandro Bogliolo is a professor at the University of Urbino, a coding ambassador and coordinator of Europe Code Week, and has been promoting and spreading computational thinking in Europe for years.

CodyRoby will be 10 years old on 23 November 2024!

Alessandro Bogliolo is organising a birthday that we will celebrate together from 19 to 25 with interactive online events during school hours, new resources, unplugged coding activities and spontaneous parties organised locally, which will contribute to the 2024 edition of CodeWeek and EU Robotics Week.

Scuola di Robotica is delighted to participate and we invite you to follow the celebrations. You can participate for free by filling in this form (in Italian) to express your interest and to receive detailed information on the activities that will be organised and to share your ideas for the celebration.

CodyRoby turns 10!

by Alessandro Bogliolo

Needless to say how much I cherish this anniversary and how important it is to share its significance with you. The diffusion of CodyRoby in schools of all levels and the familiarity, not to say the affection, with which it has been welcomed since childhood and primary school, is emblematic of the great contribution that Italian schools have made over the last 10 years to international campaigns for the diffusion of computational thinking (EU CodeWeek, EU Robotics Week and CS Education Week), the passion that has motivated it and the impact it has produced.

As is well known, computer science is the main driver of innovation and offers extraordinary opportunities for personal fulfilment, as it enables us to bring ideas to life by making the tens of billions of programmable objects around us do new things. But programming also has an intrinsic educational value, because it requires us to conceive constructive procedures and describe them so rigorously that we can entrust their execution to a machine. This induces a deep understanding of the procedures themselves and the computational aspects of the problems they solve. Today, there are tools and methods that allow an intuitive, playful and didactic approach to programming from pre-school age. The term coding has come into common use precisely to indicate the spontaneous application of these tools, which are useful for exercising computational thinking.

Among these tools is CodyRoby, a do-it-yourself unplugged coding method that I designed exactly 10 years ago, on 23 November 2014, and made available to schools as a free cultural work to facilitate participation in EU CodeWeek and EU Robotics Week by pioneer teachers. CodyRoby for me is the symbol of the enthusiasm and commitment of these teachers who, by joining literacy campaigns without waiting for funding, equipment, infrastructure or decrees, have made a decisive contribution to the introduction of coding in Italian schools, class by class, hour by hour.

In these 10 years, CodyRoby has also taken on many other forms, incorporating suggestions, stimuli and contributions from teachers and pupils. An unplugged coding Academy is now also named after CodyRoby, offering a valuable reference point for anyone who wants methodological support. But whatever the form, wherever I see CodyRoby printed, cut out and crumpled, I feel gratitude and affection for those who brought it to us and for those who used it.

elebrations
I propose that we celebrate CodyRoby’s 10th birthday together by joining the following initiatives

19/11, 17:00 – Online meeting for teachers (ZOOM link)
20/11, 11:00 – Interactive webinar for secondary school (ActiveViewer)
21/11, 9:00 – Interactive webinar for kindergarten and primary (ActiveViewer)
22/11, 10:00 – Interactive webinar for primary and lower secondary (ActiveViewer)
23/11 – Spontaneous activities that I invite you to document and share (some ideas will be presented at the 19/11 meeting)
25/11, 11:00 a.m. – The CodyRoby story – Interactive webinar in school hours for primary and secondary schools (ActiveViewer)
25/11 – opening of the CodyRoby portal!

All activities will also be valid as EU CodeWeek and EU Robotics Week activities, which each teacher will be able to upload in his/her own name in the activity map, in a way that will be illustrated from time to time and detailed on the CodeWeek Italia website.

Ho to participate
To receive detailed information on these initiatives and how to participate, I invite you to fill in the online application form now.

Materials
Here you will find colourful, celebratory materials that you can freely use in the classroom. Some lend themselves to be used as cake decorations, others to become masks to wear, others cards or drawings to colour or items to personalise.