Youth Development All Categories Arts, Culture and Heritage Education and Training Elderly Services Emergency and Poverty Relief Environmental Protection Family Services Medical and Health Rehabilitation Services Sports and Recreation Youth Development

Recognising the ever-more important role that technology plays in everyday life and the ever-changing 21st-century world, many educators have emphasised the value of teaching children computational thinking and coding skills from an early age.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust has responded to this need by initiating the CoolThink@JC programme. Its aim is to equip upper primary students with the basic coding capabilities to strengthen their computational thinking, as well as help teachers master the necessary professional skills.

The programme has been co-created by the Trust, the Education University of Hong Kong, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from the US and City University of Hong Kong, with the support of the Education Bureau. A launch ceremony was held on 15 November, when some 200 leading experts and educators, as well as representatives from the Government and industry, came along to support the initiative.

CoolThink@JC is one of a number of programmes that demonstrate the Trust’s commitment to encouraging innovation though its charitable work to create more social impact, be it innovation in service models, the application of technology, or the development of innovation capacity in the community.

Funded with a Trust donation of HK$216 million, the four-year programme is aimed at developing evidence-based teaching materials, increasing teacher capacity and developing community support.  It will inspire students to apply digital creativity in their daily lives and enhance young people’s capacity to contribute to the city’s economic and social development.  Compared with computing and coding education programmes in the school curricula of other advanced economies such as the UK, Japan and Korea, it has a number of unique features, including:

• A focus on higher-level skills such as problem-solving and computing applications, rather than technical programming skills;
• Scientific evaluation of its impact on student outcomes;
• Refinement of its pedagogy and curricular materials based on evidence and educator feedback; and
• Community outreach by educating parents as well as the public about the importance of computational thinking.

CoolThink@JC will also provide a valuable reference to Government for including computing and coding into Hong Kong educational curricula in the future. It reflects the Club’s strong commitment to the betterment of Hong Kong, in particular to the development of young people, which is one of the strategic focus areas of the Club’s Charities Trust.

The programme is expected to benefit over 16,500 primary four to six students from 32 local schools, as well as 100 teachers. The 32 pilot schools will set up a CoolThink@JC classroom, providing electronic equipment and a set of tools for supporting creative thinking, to encourage students to learn coding and inspire their creativity in an interactive and enlightening environment. For more details, please visit: http://www.coolthink.hk/.