Educating for Excellence is an Israeli organisation that operates after-school education centers for underprivileged youth across the country. Their focus is on giving their students positive learning experiences, and a lot is done to make sure that every lesson plan incorporates a lot of fun and creative activities.
I volunteered with Educating for Excellence in their Jerusalem center when I was a student. When I started thinking of ways to extend children’s exposure to Computer Science, about two years later, it was clear that Educating for Excellence will be a great place to do that. I approached them and offered to develop a Creative Computing class, based on the Creative Computing curriculum draft by Karen Brannen and the ScratchEd team.
So far, the class has been taught (by me and other instructors) in 8 centers, and it is now offered as part of Educating for Excellence curriculum in all of their centers. The class ends with a visit to Google’s offices, where the kids present their final projects, and learn about software engineering and technology. The video, from the Kids Channel in Israel, shows the first visit to the offices, where students met Meir Brand, Google Israel CEO and Google Engineers, and presented their final Scratch projects to them.
Creative Computing Class Curriculum: