Learning Activities in Colours and Rainbows for Programming Skill Development

TL;DR

This paper details the development of bilingual STEM activities focused on rainbows and colours to enhance programming skills, emphasizing active learning and structured activity design for online education.

Contribution

It introduces a structured approach for creating and organizing rainbow-themed programming activities to support online STEM education in multiple languages.

Findings

Activities promote active learning in programming and colour theory.

Structured blueprint facilitates creation of consistent, searchable educational resources.

Activities support online teaching with a focus on computer graphics principles.

Abstract

We present how we have created a series of bilingual (English and Welsh) STEM activities focusing on rainbows, colours, light and optical effects. The activities were motivated by the many rainbows that appeared in windows in the UK, in support of the National Health Service at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Rainbows are hopeful and are very fitting to be used as a positive iconic image at a time of much uncertainty. In this paper we explain how we have developed and organised the activities, focusing on colours, computer graphics and computer programming. Each lesson contains one or more activities, which enable people to take an active role in their learning. We have carefully prepared and organised several processes to guide academic colleagues to create and publish different activities in the theme. Which means that the activities appear similarly structured, can be categorised and searched in a consistent way. This structure can act as a blueprint for others to follow and apply to develop their own online course. The activities incrementally take people through learning about colour, rainbows, planning what to program, design and strategies to create colourful pictures using simple computer graphics principles based in processing.org.