Education Workshop
As part of the ECSS 2022 program, Informatics Europe organised the Education Workshop on Tuesday afternoon, 25 October, open to all participants, and chaired by Jan Vahrenhold, University of Münster. and Michael E. Caspersen, IT-vest – networking universities..
Globally, informatics education is becoming part of general education. The European Commission has digital education and skills as one of the top three priorities in the current decade (the two others being green transition and resilience) aiming to fulfil the Commission's priority, a Europe fit for the Digital Age. In 2018, the Informatics for All coalition was established to advocate for the inclusion of Informatics as a foundational discipline in schools across Europe.
In the first part of the workshop, the results of the Informatics for All coalition were presented and discussed together with the European Commission's Eurydice report describing the provision of informatics in school across Europe.
In the second part of the workshop, we discussed what the Informatics for All coalition and Informatics Europe's Working Group on Informatics Education and Research should take as next steps.
Workshop Highlights
The Workshop started with a presentation of activities of the Informatics for All coalition, including a presentation of the Informatics Reference Framework for School published earlier this year. The reference framework is a proposal for a coherent vision and shared terminology related to providing informatics to all pupils in Europe, as requested by the European Commission.
A key part of the workshop was a presentation by Sonia Piedrafita Tremosa of the Eurydice report Informatics education at school in Europe. The report marks a milestone for the Informatics for All coalition's endeavours to promote informatics as a fundamental discipline for the 21st century: (1) it is the first time 'informatics' is used in the title of an official document from the European Commission, and (2) the reference framework is systematically used to analyse learning outcomes in 39 education systems in the 27 EU member states and 10 other Erasmus+ countries.
The workshop finished with an activity identifying challenges related to implementing the two-tier strategy of Informatics for All, and people volunteering to work on some of these challenges through IE’s Education Research Working Group.
*Please note that the photos above are better viewed when applying zoom out.
Presentation slides of the workshop are available to download here.
