Educating students in informatics at school is essential to equip every citizen with the necessary knowledge to participate, influence, and contribute to developing the digital world. By learning informatics, students can safely and critically navigate the internet and contribute to an expanding infosphere that consists of more and more algorithms that may be biased or information that may be flawed or incomplete.
Our project
Our DIGITAL FIRST project aims at shaping the future of informatics education in primary and secondary schools across Europe to match the needs of today’s children, the digital natives, born in a digital world and arriving at school education already with a certain level of digital skills.
Informatics is still a relatively new topic for school curriculums and exchanges among our project partners from different countries demonstrated a wide spectrum in terms of the educational offer, ranging from no systematic implementation in some countries to the presence of compulsory or elective courses at primary and secondary levels of education in others.
DIGITAL FIRST partners find it very important to understand the existing framework across Europe to develop innovative pedagogical approaches based on the actual challenges and opportunities.
A snapshot of the current context
One of the key resources for this is the Eurydice Report on Informatics Education at School in Europe published in September 2022. This report analyses the current status of teaching informatics as a separate or interdisciplinary subject in primary and secondary education across 37 European countries.
The analysis points to 10 core areas of informatics as a scientific discipline: data and information, algorithms, programming, computing systems, networks, people–system interface, design and development, modelling and simulation, awareness and empowerment, and safety and security.
The report also focuses on the professional profiles of those teaching informatics at school:
While informatics is usually taught by generalist teachers in primary schools, secondary schools tend to have specialist teachers either in informatics or other subjects for informatics education.
The data reflects well the diversity across the European countries in terms of the existence of informatics as a distinct discipline in the school curriculums and whether it is taught by specialist informatics teachers or as an interdisciplinary subject by other specialist or generalist teachers in primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education.
The report also looks into the existence of professional development programmes for becoming a specialist informatics teacher across Europe (i.e. initial teacher education, alternative pathways and retraining opportunities) and support systems for in-service teachers. The report concludes that while “the ideal scenario would be to set up initial training to equip all informatics teachers with the necessary theoretical and pedagogical knowledge before integrating informatics into the curriculum”, empowering existing teachers with informatics teaching skills would be the most practical solution to address the current challenges in a relatively shorter period and without being blocked with the need of large-scale financial investment.
What do we want to achieve?
Keeping in mind this snapshot of the current context, the DIGITAL FIRST project will develop innovative pedagogical approaches and run piloting programmes in selected schools to strengthen the knowledge and competences of informatics teachers in integrating informatics into education to promote the active and safe use of digital technology among their students.
Taking it one step further, our project calls for a move from a traditional approach in informatics education based on programming languages and technical knowledge to an innovative pedagogical approach focusing on computational thinking to help students learn how to address real-life challenges. This shift in education will encourage the young generation to be “active creators” of the digital world, rather than “passive consumers”.
Participate in our survey!
DIGITAL FIRST partners are currently collecting further insights directly from teachers: One of our project’s key initiatives is an online survey designed for informatics teachers and interdisciplinary educators. Are you an informatics teacher or a teacher teaching informatics as an interdisciplinary subject? Join our online survey which is available in multiple languages:
English, Bulgarian, Croatian, Finnish, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Portuguese, Spanish
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