Cardross Primary School is the number one school in Scotland when it comes to designing computer games. The team beat teams from across Scotland to win the Scottish Microsoft ‘Kodu’ computer programming competition at West College Scotland on 16 June. 

Now, they will be the first ever Scottish school to be invited to Microsoft’s UK HQ in Reading to participate in the UK wide programming competition in July against schools from all over the UK.

The Cardross Primary School team ‘Klan Kodu’ - Erin Gregory, Etienne Machtelinckx and Sarah Mitchell - impressed judges with their game ‘Maze Adventures’. Their teachers are Nick Henry Kiersty Travers.

The Kodu Kup is a national game creation competition organised by the Microsoft Educator Network, and is aimed at all children in the UK aged between seven and 14. Students plan and create their games and are encouraged to assess and give one another feedback.

Over the last year Argyll and Bute Council’s learning technologies team have been providing additional exciting, computer science related learning opportunities for young people at primary level.

The long-term goal of this project is to capture the imagination of young people, to showcase what can be created and inspire through technology.

The council’s Executive Director of Community Services, Cleland Sneddon, said, “Before starting this project we were very aware that our young people had excellent ICT skills and made very good use of technology.  However, this project is about equipping young people at primary level with skills and knowledge to turn computing ideas into concepts, improve their understanding of how technologies work and gain some understanding of the concepts involved in computer programming.

“This project is important to the economy of Argyll and Bute, particularly as we want to offer our young people as much choice as possible in where they live and work.  We feel that the technology sector provides a number of remote working and company start up opportunities.  Additionally we are very aware that almost every field of employment now relies on technology, and our challenge is to prepare young people for jobs that may not even exist yet.”

Cardross Primary School head teacher Elspeth Davis, said, “This is an outstanding achievement for our pupils and school. Technology is an area that is incredibly important to us as we prepare pupils for skills for their futures.

“Our pupils are demonstrating creativity, problem solving, presentation and collaborative working skills, as well as the practical skills of coding and programming while using Kodu. We are preparing future programmers - technology is fun and games but also about learning; and its capacity in this respect is awesome.

“We are proud to be developing skills in our young people to be the progammers of the future. Kodu has given us the perfect starting point for introducing and developing this with our children. We are exceptionally proud of them, their skills and achievement and wish them well for the UK Final in July.”

For more information about Argyll and Bute Council’s Learning Technologies go to :https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/glowblogs/eslb/2014/04/08/learning-technologies-in-argyll-bute-council/