How Program Junior Creator was developed?

As Program Junior Creator is the first program that brings the students into the world of programming, it is carefully crafted with a lot of consideration on how the program can encourage creative thinking in students.

When starting, we want to feed the students' curiosity by covering multiple facets of the computer world by educating them on computer software and hardware. We teach them to observe their surroundings and spot the applications of computer sciences in their daily lives so they can relate easily to the lessons in class. Considering our students are fairly young and new to the Internet world, we think it is vital to include internet safety in our course. By giving solid examples of the dos and don'ts to the students, they can distinguish what is safe to do online and what is not.

Thinking back as kids, did we like to learn from textbooks? I guess most of our answers are no. Therefore, we want to change that tradition by incorporating games into the students' learning. Students will be coding for simple games independently by applying basic programming concepts. They have the freedom to express their creativity and imagination in their game-making process. They get to decide on the background they want to use for the games, the interaction between the game characters, the sound effects when some actions are executed, and so forth!

Moreover, we have prepared many additional games known as the Mastery Box Challenge (MBC) for students capable of finishing the compulsory projects early. The games are beginner-friendly, so our students can build their confidence along the way. It is much more satisfying to complete a simple game than never finishing a massive project, right?

The platform we picked for Program Junior Creator is Tynker, a web-based platform that uses visual blocks to help kids learn to code. The colorful blocks of code in Tynker are visually attractive, making it exciting and engaging for kids to kickstart their journey of learning to code. The kids can simply code by dragging and dropping the code blocks. What's more fascinating is that the pieces of code that don't make computational sense won't fit together, making syntax errors literally impossible.

We developed Program Junior Creator with only a motive in mind: we want to cultivate interest in learning computer science in students, even for those as young as eight years old. Therefore, instead of stuffing this program with programming concepts, we structured this program to let our students have fun while learning with us.

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