COVID has had a significant impact on how students engage with hands-on learning and poses additional responsibilities for parents and teachers to engage their students in meaningful learning experiences.
Today, we are launching the seventh edition of the Code to Learn competition as a means to immerse students in creative and computational thinking, along with building their skills in programming.
Students from Class 5 to 12 from any school in India can register through their parents or teachers to show their coding genius using exciting tools like Scratch, App Inventor and Google AutoML to build games, animation, android apps and/or their own machine learning applications; without writing even a single line of code!
Over the years, Computer Science and Programming has evolved and become one of the strongest means of solving real-life problems. The Code to Learn competition provides a platform for kids to learn the basics of coding and build a stronger foundation in Computer Science. In a fun and engaging way, we aim to inspire students to use technology to solve problems around them.
In line with this objective, we have been running the Code to Learn competition successfully for school students in India for the last six years. The program has also been adopted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India under the Rashtriya Avishkar Abhiyan.
Artificial Intelligence has become a strong enabler to solve many challenging problems of society. Google has put AI to use to solve some of the most pressing issues, from helping predict early blindness to giving timely updates on floods in India. We have a special AI track for class 9 -12 students where they use Google's existing Machine Learning models to create projects with a problem statement and a data set of their choice. Students define a problem and select any open dataset or create their own (images or text) and train a pre-trained machine learning model to create their own Machine Learning application using Google Cloud AutoML.
Code to Learn concluded successfully in 2019 and witnessed an overwhelming participation of students from across the country with innovative and exciting projects. We saw powerful applications ranging from fun games to applications that help farmers with timely information. In the Artificial Intelligence theme, we received excellent projects where students defined and tried to solve various societal problems like early detection of breast cancer, predicting learning disabilities through images of handwriting and segregating recyclable plastic waste using Computer Vision models.
The competition registrations are now open and parents, teachers or legal guardians can register on behalf of the student on the competition website (g.co/codetolearn). Students from across India can submit their projects by 31st July, 2020. We also have online resources available on our website to learn Scratch, AppInventor and Google Cloud AutoML to get started.
We are very excited about this year's competition, and are looking forward to seeing the innovation and creativity that students will present to us via their projects! For more details, visit our website: g.co/codetolearn.
Code to Learn is co-organized by Google Cloud, ACM India, CS Pathshala, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), IIIT Bangalore. ACM is the worldwide society for scientific and educational computing with an aim to advance Computer Science both as a science (through CS Pathshala) and as a profession. IISc and IIIT Bangalore are research-oriented universities based in Bangalore.
Posted by Divy Thakkar, Research and Education Program Manager, and Ashwani Sharma, Head of Research Operations and University Relations, India, AU/NZ and SEA