Teaching environmental impact
At the Tuesday, June 21, meeting of Powell River Board of Education, trustees received an update on the Eco Change Operation (ECO) from Karin Westland, School District 47 sustainability education coordinator.
ECO is a district-wide program where students study impacts of production and behaviours on the environment.
Westland told the board that this year the focus was on the ecological lifecycle of the packaging industry.
“It was a macro lesson on everything from the extraction of resources, to producing packages to the eventual disposal,” said Westland.
Westland said she would like to see the program expanded beyond grade one to seven. Next year, she said she hopes to see ECO as part of the high school curriculum to get all students of the school district interacting together across ages and grades.
Writing in code
An announcement that surprised many of the school districts in the province, according to School District 47 superintendent Jay Yule, is a Ministry of Education curriculum requirement for mandatory computer coding.
“It’s brand new,” said Yule. “We are tasked with implementing, teaching, determining what grade levels it will be taught and what the program will look like.”
Beginning in 2018/19, grade six to nine students must complete the computational-thinking module of at least 15 hours that will give them an introduction to writing computer code.
