Computer Programming Summer School a Massive Hit

A dedicated, skilled team of young learners from Dunoon Grammar School recently sacrificed a full week of their precious summer holiday to attend the inaugural ‘Code Ninjas’ Summer School held in the school’s Faculty of Business & Computing.
Rather than learning the way of the Nindō – the code of the mythical oriental assassins – the young people were submerged in a variety of projects designed to stretch and enhance their skills in computing coding.
The young learners quickly captured skills in a diverse range of programming platforms, including:
• Microsoft Visual Basic. The key programming language used within the school as part of SQA courses and qualifications
• Web Authoring coding, using industry standard tools including Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and Flash. As the week progressed, learners developed professional looking websites on a range of topics.
• Learners also experimented with other programming environments not normally included as part of the formal school curriculum, such as Ruby, Python and C#.
• XNA – Microsoft’s industry standard game development engine – was also explored during the summer school along with other simple game design platforms such as Kodu and Scratch.
Graham Stoddart from the school’s Faculty of Business & Computing, who facilitated the Summer School commented:
“Learners have been able to enhance their programming skills and interact with a number of different pieces of hardware and software that we would not normally be able to cover in class. The learners themselves have been a credit to the school showing an exemplary attitude and dedication throughout the whole week. Hopefully this is the first of many DGS Code Ninja Summer Schools.”
Code Ninja Henry Togwell stated:

“The summer school has been great fun and I have been able to try out new things such as coding using C# and programming my own game controllers”.
Code Ninja Scott Morton added:

“I enjoyed the Summer School because unlike at home where you can learn programming in isolation, it is an environment where we all have the same purpose and can learn from each other”.
New Dunoon Grammar School Head Teacher Mr David Mitchell, who formally takes up his post in August, popped in to visit the Code Ninjas in action. He commented:
“I was delighted to witness so many of our young people actively involved in practical skills development within a very creative learning environment. It was clear that those involved were stretching their coding skills and the software our Ninjas developed was to an impressive standard. I would like to thank Graham Stoddart from the Business & Computing department and Gary Clark from Argyll & Bute Council for offering such a rich experience for all involved.”

Please contact Paul Gallanagh at Dunoon Grammar School for further information.
Tel: 01369 705010 or email: Paul.Gallanagh@argyll-bute.gov.uk