Thanks to a collaboration agreement reached last summer between Ruben Caruana, Enterprise manager at Microsoft Malta and Dr Kenneth Vella, headmaster of Mater Boni Consilli St Joseph school in Paola, during this scholastic year, primary and secondary girls attending the school are being given the opportunity to use Microsoft educational tablets during different lessons and in various subjects. 

Through this initiative, members of staff at St Joseph Paola will be given the chance to prepare their lessons with a difference, using varied technological and educational aids, including tablets. Cristina Mifsud was also selected by the school administration as the teacher coordinator of this initiative. Recently, Ms Mifsud managed to set up an unusual scenario during her Geography lesson about the water cycle with Form 1 girls. During this lesson, learning was not achieved in the usual traditional setting. The session was held in the school's science lab, giving the girls the opportunity to make use of both their tablets and the science apparatus.

The children in class were split into four groups and each group was assigned one of the processes of the water cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection). The girls carried out varied experiments on this topic. Apart from these experiments, the girls also got the opportunity to experiment with their tablet, to film the experiments as they were being done and produce a collage of images related to the topic. All the material gathered during the lesson was later assembled into a PowerPoint presentation using Office Mix tools to animate the work. The finalized project will be uploaded to take part in Microsoft's regional online Mixathon Challenge later on this month.

Apart from this, earlier this month, the school also took part in the Hour of Code - an international event that took place all over the world to introduce coding to the young generation. Coding is perceived as difficult and not appealing by the majority of the students and this was an opportunity for the students to prove themselves by participating in a fun exercise. During their IT lesson, the Grade 4 girls, experienced coding through Minecraft. In this exercise the students had to follow the prompts in order to instruct the character to do what was being asked. During this task, the girls were paired and each couple was given a tablet, they logged in an account which was created on purpose for them by their IT teacher. The girls used the tablets as a whole class as this permitted not only more interaction between the couple, but also between different groups and the fact that the tablet is a mobile device permitted also more accessibility where the girls could also see their friends' progression (as the tablets are monitored by one software that controls them all, thus the teacher focused on specific devices to show the others what needs to be done). The Hour of Code was a successful event where while passing from level to level, the girls familiarised with coding and actually wrote their first lines of coding. The students liked the fact that tablets were used because even though each pair worked on their device, the different couples could interact with the rest of their friends and could help more the other to overcome and surpass a level as the students could see their friends' progression on the interactive board.

In this educational initiative with Microsoft, the staff at Mater Boni Consilii St Joseph Paola are being technically supported and assisted by Chris Demicoli, Microsoft in Education manager and Jurgen Calleja, chief executive officer of ICT2Biz.