NSCOE Winter Camp 2025: Building Foundations for a New Kind of Literacy

The NSCOE Winter Camp 2025-26 marked an important step in rethinking how children are introduced to learning in a rapidly evolving world. Hosted at the Nawaz Sharif Center of Excellence for Early Childhood Education (NSCOE) in Lahore, the winter camp brought together structured play, creativity, and foundational coding literacy in an environment designed to spark curiosity and confidence.

NSCOE is Punjab’s first public-sector preschool center dedicated to early childhood education. It is built on the belief that strong foundations in the early years - rooted in play, inquiry, and exploration - shape lifelong learning outcomes. By adopting global best practices and adapting them to local contexts, NSCOE aims to demonstrate what high-quality, inclusive early education can look like within the public system.

As part of this vision, NSCOE partnered with Code School to deliver Coding Literacy Classes during the Winter Camp, held from 26 December 2025 to 10 January 2026. The program targeted students aged 7 to 13 and was designed to provide early exposure to computational thinking, logical reasoning, and creative problem-solving through age-appropriate, hands-on learning.

Over the course of the camp, more than 50 students participated in 14 instructor-led sessions, conducted six days a week. Using block-based programming in Scratch, students worked toward building a guided Defender-style arcade game. Through this project, they learned core concepts such as sequencing, loops, conditionals, variables, and coordinate-based movement. The focus was not on memorizing tools, but on understanding cause and effect - how ideas translate into actions on screen.

The instructional approach followed a learn-and-build model. Concepts were introduced briefly and immediately applied, allowing students to see results in real time. This side-by-side delivery of explanation and implementation helped sustain engagement and made abstract ideas tangible, particularly for first-time learners.

The camp welcomed children with a wide range of prior exposure to technology. Many students were engaging with coding for the first time. Despite these differences, classrooms were marked by high levels of curiosity, experimentation, and peer learning.

Students asked questions freely, debugged their work, and grew increasingly confident in modifying and extending their projects. The most significant gains were observed among beginners, who progressed from no prior experience to independently building functional elements of a game.

Reflecting on the experience, NSCOE Principal Minahil Hussain noted, "We were honestly amazed. Seeing children as young as six build their own games was something we did not expect, and the excitement and confidence they showed were incredible. This experience has convinced us of the value of introducing coding early, and we are excited to take this forward across more grades with Code School."

The closing ceremony was attending by the Provincial Minister for School Education in Punjab, Pakistan Rana Sikandar Hayat. Selected student projects were demonstrated live, giving children the opportunity to showcase their work and take pride in what they had created. These moments of presentation and recognition reinforced learning and highlighted the confidence students had built over the course of the camp.

Beyond the individual outcomes, the NSCOE Winter Camp represents a broader shift that education systems must make. Skills such as computational thinking, problem-solving, and digital creativity are no longer optional or extracurricular. They are foundational literacies, as essential as reading and numeracy in preparing children for the future.

What this camp ultimately demonstrates is possibility. It shows that with thoughtful program design, trained educators, and institutional commitment, public education spaces can move beyond passive use of technology toward active creation. As conversations around education increasingly focus on relevance, equity, and future readiness, initiatives like the NSCOE Winter Camp offer a practical, scalable example of how modern skills can be embedded early - not as a privilege for a few, but as a foundation for all.