Digital Technology

Girls Programming Network (GPN) Coding Day – Melbourne University

On Saturday, the 31st of August, Eloise (8S), and Elyse (8E) and myself headed with Mrs Butler to Melbourne University. I was the DJ for the car ride there, filling the car with my wonderful music choices (SIX the musical). 

When we arrived, we checked in, and got our name tags. Once everyone had arrived, we began by being assigned to our rooms, by the stickers we got from the quiz assessing our coding abilities. Luckily, me, Eloise, and Elyse were all in the same room. 

The theme for the event was “Guess Who”, so we used the Python coding language to code a Guess Who game. The day was structured so that we had a presentation on an element we would need to use, and then 15-20 mins of coding time before another presentation.

At around 12:00, we had lunch, which consisted of some Domino's pizza and an apple or muesli bar. During the lunch break, we were allowed to go to a near-by coffee shop, House of Cards Espresso.

This Coffee shop has a system where instead of getting names for orders, they give you a giant playing card, which after receiving your order, you put into one of four slots, each slot being associated with a health, social, environmental, or cultural cause. At the end of the month, the slot with the most cards is the one they donate the most money to. I personally LOVE this idea, and House of Cards was definitely a highlight of my day.

After lunch, we played some no-screen games, making an algorithm to sort different things into different categories. These things included Characters and People, as well as Plants & Animals. 

After the no-screen games, we went back to coding for another hour or so. At the end of the day most of the participants had a working Guess Who game.

After a long drive back, the three of us were dropped home, satisfied after our long and fulfilling day. I would like to say a really big thank you to Ms Butler for taking us to the coding event.

Zoe Hodge McAvaney, 8P

We left for Melbourne at 7:30 in the morning since Mrs Butler was kind enough to drive us to the University and we needed to be picked up early enough to make it to the 9am start. Us three students and Mrs Butler had a fun time listening to music and chatting on the way there (thanks to Zoe for being our DJ.)

After we arrived at the University we picked up our nametags and made our way to our rooms and got started on the coding.

Our assigned task was to make a guess who game using the Python coding language and a booklet to help us along the way. There were intermittent presentations about what we needed to do and a lovely group of people to help us if we got stuck.

During lunchtime we got to have some Domino's pizza and fruit, also if we brought any snacks we could eat them too. We got to have a wander outside and go to a coffee shop on the campus called House of cards. 

After lunch we played some games which included working together to sort different people, animals, plants and characters into different categories and talking about why we think they fit into certain categories.

After the games we completed our guess who coding and received certificates. Then we headed back to Geelong after an amazing day of fun and coding.

I would like to say a huge thank you to Mrs Butler for taking us to the event and helping out a lot with the coding.

Eloise James, 8S