Are you ready to get involved?

The first literacy Coding Campaign of this new school year is about to start!

EU Code Week 2018 coming and this year there will be two weeks to plan and organize events. Save the date: 6-21 October! We did it last year and it was great!

Let’s step back. According to the indications of the European Commission, which promotes innovative approaches, many schools are going to follow the educational campaigns proposed by the Ministries of Education, that are pushing towards a change. Different keywords are set to guide innovation:

Diffusion and involvement. This entails encouraging participation. The initiatives are promoted through websites, digital sharing platforms and social media. They are addressed to schools, through teachers, and aims to involve students and families. They aim at involving institutional stakeholders and other partners.

The primary objective however, is dissemination. Each campaign has specific users according to the theme, but it is open to everyone. The proposals aim to disseminate activities and best practices, with a strong innovative trend. This is the case of the EU Code Week, which is a grassroots initiative that promotes coding activities and computational thinking.

The EU Code Week, on its sixth birthday, already boasts an exponential success. Over the past year, more than 22,000 events have been taken place around the world. The certificates of excellence of the European Commission for coding literacy were received by all the schools that involved more than 50% student participation. Our school was one of that and our pupils were happy and proud of that!

The new ambitious goal, proposed by Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, is to involve at least 50% of all European schools by 2020. The  etwinning group coding@schools supports teachers and students to approach coding activities and opportunities. The eTwinning project linked to the group had the quality label prize from eTwinning national units in many countries last year. Learning to code helps children and young people to make sense of the rapidly changing world, to expand their technological skills and develop skills in order to explore new ideas in a creative and fun way. The impact of coding is overwhelming. Thanks to its playful approach, users are transformed from passive subjects who recipients information, to active ones who can solve problems, make decisions and perform tasks. Coding becomes a vehicle of contents to give value to the learning social dimension, developing a meta-cognition implicitly linked to debugging and error correction. However, coding is not a key-in-hand activity. It helps to improve computational thinking, a transversal skill that allows us to conceive and express rigorous procedures that lead to the solution of a problem or the realization of an idea. It can be applied to any discipline even without specific tools, but requires reflection and awareness. Last year, EU Code Week was a big celebration filled with colors and music. We can guess that this year’s numbers will be amazing and even more successful. Our events were on the European maps. We’ve learnt to cooperate with partners and deal with challenging coding games and activities. Give life to ideas! The motto of the 2018 edition of the EU Code Week is an invitation to express oneself  by planning, forging new ties and bringing students closer to STEM, because coding is for everyone, just as education is for everyone. Don’t miss it!

Author: Stefania Altieri

Scientix Ambassador and eTwinning coding@schools group moderator

Tags: EU Code Week 2018