On January 30th, Mr. Se-yong Jung of SaeOn, the inventor of the Altino coding car, arrived in Honolulu to spend a week with Oceanit and to meet our coding education partners. Visiting along with Mr. Seyong Jung were five top coding students from Korea, who won the 2018 International Altino Competition.
In their week on Oahu, Oceanit and our Korean guests held multiple Altino scratch coding workshops to help spread computer science to educators and leaders in our community.
Mr. Jung created the Altino system when as a young student he was affected by a lack of programming skills and practical computer science education in Korea’s schools. Nothing yet existed at the time that could make the connection between computer programming and non-CS classes, and all coding was self-taught. Mr. Jung created Altino to provide students with a cirriculum and support system, so they now have an early advantage that he didn’t.
The Oceanit-led Altino program in Hawai’i has been gaining reach across our state’s educational community as we strive to train 5000 teachers in five years. The Altino car is empowering us to reach non-coding and non-technical teachers with practical programming skills through a haptic, fun robotic device. Those teachers learn and write curriculum around computer science which can be brought to their diverse subject areas.
On Saturday and Sunday, February 2nd and 3rd, while many people were focused on the Super Bowl, these dedicated Korean students helped to teach over 30 public schoolteachers and other educational figures using Altino and MIT’s Scratch visual coding system.
Monday was spent with our partners, Kamehameha Schools. The students visited the Kapalama Campus and coded with around 120 Kamehameha middle school students. The final two days of their visit were spent receiving honors from the Honolulu City Council and appearing on Hawaii News Now’s ‘Geek Beat’ before their flight home to Daegu.
Along with being a highly productive and educational visit, it was uplifting to see how far Altino coding has come since its inception in Korea, and how teachers and students can be brought together for the good of STEM education. The Korean students may not know it, but they have started a chain reaction of coding education that could change how computer science is taught in the US – and one that will inspire innovation in generations of students to come.
Read more about SaeOn here: http://saeon.mir9.co.kr/
