Primož Umek, Simona Ostović, OŠ Orehek Kranj

This festival offers talented students an opportunity to discover topics that are not prescribed by the curriculum, while the activities enable students divergent, critical and logical thinking, empathy, expression through art, encourage curiosity, imagination and creativity. Talented pupils want to be engaged into activities that have been designed for them only, and believe such activities are not organised frequently for them by schools. Hence, our Festival is a welcome event in the field of working with talented students. Workshops offer a challenge to teachers, as the activities must be cross-curricular and a result of team work. We prepared materials for the workshop “Lets’ make a computer game” individually, however, we later on harmonised our ideas and searched for the most optimum tasks for pupils. Introduction features a few computer-free tasks, while later on students used Scratch – one of the latest programming languages. It is simple, code does not have to be written manually, and pieces of code are put together like blocks. Students can focus on problem solving, without having to linger on complex syntax. The initial computer exercises were intended for reading the programme (tracking the code and predicting the results), while later the students in pairs corrected the mistakes in the programme (the sequence of orders, correct order). Further, the students learnt the basic concepts in programming the variable, loops and conditional clauses. The second part required the students to design their own computer game in groups.