Tech Sampler’s Final Bytes
“I had a lot of fun, a lot of challenges and a lot of learning.”
Salmon Arm Secondary Grade 11 student Walter Bullen nicely summed up the sentiment of many of his peers on the final day of their Technology Sampler course. Okanagan College and SD83 have provided the course to district Grades 10-12 students for over five years. Last night, students gathered in the Salmon Arm campus student association area to showcase their final projects and then play some games while munching down on some pizza.
Josh Meikle is a Business Development and Project Management Consultant that specialize in computer software engineering and has taught the course at the Salmon Arm campus for three years. He says the quality of the projects displayed by the students continues to improve. “Every year, we see crazy, awesome, cool projects (that the students do),” Meikle says.
The nine graduating students come from Salmon Arm, JL Jackson and AL Fortune secondaries. All of them designed and coded their own games using software ranging from Python, Java Script, CSS, HTML and combinations of said programs. Students designed games that shot things and told you the current weather in certain places around the planet. They also had games where you can choose your own adventure and path, participate in games of chance, use math and geometry to advance your standing and display a modern version of checkers. Some of students wrote as little as 140 lines of code to make their projects work—some use several hundred.
The Technology Sampler course (formally known as “Gateway to Technology” or G2T) allows students to receive a workplace certificate from the college and gives them a step up in taking future tech-related programs in post-secondary. The course counts as a high school elective course. SD83 pays for the tuition for the students and parents which costs several hundred dollars per student.
The next cohort of tech sampler will run this September. Current Grade 9-11 students are welcome to apply to the course anytime before May 30th to be part of next year’s cohort. If you wish more information about the program, please talk with the career counsellor at your neighbourhood high school our you can reach out to George Richard at 778-824-1188 via text or phone or you can email grichard@sd83.bc.ca.