Removes at Guardian HQ

Twenty Removes (year 8) pupils were lucky enough to be selected to visit The Guardian newspaper headquarters on Tuesday 3 March. They participated in a journalism and computer coding workshop, in which they created news quizzes based on stories from the Guardian website implementing coding skills which they were taught in the workshop in order to put these quizzes online.  Questions could be selected from a range of types of news - home, world, sport, entertainment and culture, and science and technology. Pupils worked in pairs to read through the selected articles and form challenging questions based on their content, working in multiple-choice format.

Coders from The Guardian, who work to translate the news stories from journalists into code to put on the newspaper’s website or app, came in to teach the students about computer coding, in a new effort to encourage children to become more interested in technological skills like this. Pupils learnt about a variety of codes including HTML (Hyper-Text Mark-up Link), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), and JavaScript.

Once the basics of the code had been taught, the pupils worked to transfer their questions from Standard English into JavaScript, assisted by coding experts from around the offices. Once the quiz itself was online, they were able to personalise it, changing fonts, colours, buttons and sizes, so that each quiz was unique to the pair themselves.

Time was allowed for pupils to play each other’s quizzes, testing how much knowledge they had picked up from their skim-reads of the articles. All of them agreed that it was a fun, enjoyable and one-of-a-kind workshop and hope that the trip will continue to run in coming years.

Emilia Hitching (RS)