Rebecca Impressed Her Principal (and Entire School) with Her Project!

Rebecca Impressed Her Principal (and Entire School) with Her Project!

Get ready to be impressed: this maker has taken coding with Tynker to a whole other level, using it to enact social change! Twelve-year-old Rebecca used Tynker to speak out against bullying in an assembly at school! She’s in 6th grade, and when she’s not in school, she’s busy reading, playing soccer, doing gymnastics, or playing piano. She’s been creating some really great projects, so we chatted with her to learn more about her.

Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? No – it probably hasn’t been invented yet!

What’s your favorite subject in school? Everything!

How did you get introduced to Tynker? At school. I’ve been using it for less than 6 months. I’ve already had two projects featured this week!

How did you learn how to use Tynker? In school, they gave us the first lesson and we completed that, then they told us to do some of the other projects that were there. From there, I kept using it myself.

What is your favorite thing you’ve made? Probably the restaurant ones, this other one I made called Ketchup Wars, and another one that’s a quiz about stopping bullying. For the bullying one, we had a video we had to watch from a website and my teacher told me to make up a quiz based on what had been said in the video. In the assembly, one of my friends and I asked the questions using Tynker up on the screen. We had one of the other girls in our class in a box like a robot, and she turned on and played the video for everyone to see. She pretended she made Tynker come up on the screen! The video was playing while we asked the questions to the audience and got our answers, and then afterward they had me talk about how creative it was. The principal said she thought the presentation was from a website – she was surprised I’d made it!

Rebecca’s teacher Meredith commented on this, telling us, “Rebecca’s Anti-Bullying Project evolved from an Assembly Presentation to our school to tie in with ‘National Day of Action Against Bullying’. Rebecca worked largely independently.” We’re very impressed by and proud of the way Rebecca used Tynker at her school’s assembly!

Do you look at the Tynker community projects? Yeah, with some of the projects I’ve made, I’ve gotten inspiration and ideas from the community – especially the featured projects.

How do you get inspiration for your projects? I normally just do Tynker whenever creativity just goes *pow!* Ideas just explode in my head, and then end up writing everything down and coming back to it afterward.

What’s your favorite feature in Tynker? Probably the fact that you can draw your characters and your scenes, and not have to just use what’s there. I also like having pictures from Google.

What do you do with a project when you’re done with it? I mainly just publish it straight away and hope for the best!

What are you planning to make next? Probably another restaurant one with drinks in it. I also want to reenact picture books on Tynker. Another one I’ve been working on for a month asks you what your birthday is – for example, it could be 8th of January – so you type that in and it comes up with something like, “You share the same birthday as Elvis Presley!” I want to do that for every day of the year, but I’m only at January 14th.

How do you think learning coding now will help you in the future? Because most jobs in the future will probably revolve around coding and technology.

Why do you like to code? It’s fun and not something that everyone learns, it’s something different. It’s another way to express your ideas.

What advice would you give for kids starting out with Tynker? Just start with the basic projects and work your way up from there.

Rebecca’s mother Nicole and father Gary commented on Rebecca’s recent coding abilities, saying, “she obviously enjoys it and finds it challenging. I think it’s a good skill to have in the current environment.” Nicole noted that given Rebecca’s interests, “It’s just something that just sort of happened – it’s a natural transition.”

Her parents have seen Rebecca developing many skills since she’s been coding! The most prevalent one? “Perseverance! She’ll start doing something and will generally sit there for an hour until she figures it out!”

Rebecca’s teacher Meredith spoke to us and gave a bit of background regarding how Rebecca was introduced to Tynker. She told us that this year is the first time the school has used Tynker for 5th and 6th grades, and that “Tynker is an incredible resource!” Of the Tynker lessons, she said, “Whilst teachers acted as facilitators of these sessions, the collaboration and peer mentoring was very impressive.”

Meredith told us that students used Tynker to create a conversation between two characters about the Federation of Australia as a way to incorporate Digital Technologies with HASS lessons. The project was “set back in the 1890s so students were very creative with their backgrounds, characters, and costumes.” Students loved it – according to Meredith, “Many students were super engaged and worked on personal projects in their own time and at home.” She told us she’s currently working with students to develop computational thinking, and that “our lessons are focused on Pattern Decomposition/Pattern Recognition/Pattern Abstraction and the writing an algorithm that can be transferred across to a Visual Coding Program such as Tynker.”

Thanks for speaking with us, Rebecca, Nicole, Gary, and Meredith! We are so excited by Rebecca’s unique use of and impressive success with Tynker. We can’t wait to see what you create next, Rebecca – keep coding, and keep spreading your message!