Ağrı aims higher thanks to coding
The second phase of the “KodlAAğrı Project” started as launched by the Governorship of Ağrı in the 2017-2018 academic year, where more than 165 thousand primary, secondary and high school students have been provided with coding training. Ağrı, which previously ranked 81st in the education rankings, has managed to go up to the 75th place recently. With this project, it is aimed to climb higher over 50 in the training rankings.
A workshop was held with the participation of experts from across the country to determine the road map of the second phase, which aims to make Ağrı “the IT center of Anatolia”, which ranks low in the per capita income list, and thus contributes to the economic development of the city. A group of 28 people, including experts, educators and media members from technology companies and NGOs based in İstanbul, Ankara and İzmir, met the students by seeing the coding trainings given in Ağrı as part of the two-day KodlAAğrı. They participated to the workshop directed by Digit4Turkey Association President Ali Rıza Ersoy and discussed how the project can be economically useful to the city in the medium and long term.
Realizing the project in 2017, Ağrı Governor Süleyman Elban emphasized that they are trying for students to gain competence in a field independent of geography such as ‘coding and informatics’ and to give the message: “There is a future for you in Ağrı.”, regardless of what profession the students dream of.
4 schools and 460 students in 2017, 961 schools and 165 thousand students today
Launched in November 2017-2018 with 75 computers in 4 schools across the city, the KodlAAğrı project initially aimed to provide coding training only to 5th and 6th grade students. For this, at first, teachers had to receive coding training from experts in the field throughout Turkey. At the end of the first year, the project, which has become widespread, was four times bigger and coding training was provided for 20 thousand students. As of the 2019-2020 academic year, the third academic year after the start of the project, coding education was extended to all schools in the city including kindergartens and 165 thousand students were given different levels of coding training.
‘Robotic Coding’ takes place in students’ routine life in Ağrı
Students do not only get basic coding training, but also learn programming through the “Scratch” program after they reached a certain level in algorithm creation and coding. The students who passed to the next stage started to make robotic coding with Arduino. At this stage, students have reached the point where they can program their own smart technologies that they designed in line with their abilities and possibilities starting from simple circuit creation and programming. Today, thousands of students have reached the level of using robotic coding in many schools in the city.
“Coding is our flagship in education”
Governor of Ağrı, Süleyman Elban emphasized that they focused on educational activities that will improve the informatics skills of the students in order to shape the future of the city. Stating that coding education is a part of “raising equipped people”, Governor Elban said: “Coding is our flagship in the field of education. If this story is successful in Ağrı, it will not even be discussed whether it will be successful in other cities as well.”
The reflection of the future and dreams on the walls…
While visiting the schools in Ağrı, the pictures and writings in the school corridors do not go unnoticed. The walls filled with pictures that reflect the excitement of teachers and students are also filled with future and technology sayings, which you can see on the walls of a large corporate company. In the meantime, art and music did not remain in the background in the educational process, and even children signed many works to combine art and music with technology.
Most of the children in Ağrı do not have a mobile phone, so they have not lost their creativity. How do we understand this? These children, who have not met games that are ready to play, write and play their own games on computers in schools.
The excited students eagerly introduced dozens of projects such as an earthquake simulator, applications that help fight obesity, vehicles that change direction when encountering an obstacle and thus avoid accidents, light control with sensors, digital guitar and piano that allow kindergarten students to learn numbers and notes. Ağrı Eleşkirt Industrial Vocational High School students made everyone proud with their electric vehicle called “Eleşkirt”, which is entirely made of waste and scrap materials including solar panels.
