TACCLE3 - Coding

The project aims are:

• To encourage and support teachers to introduce coding, programming and / or computational thinking as part of the curriculum in the 4 – 14 classroom to better equip pupils to develop the skills needed by the European labour market.
• To broaden teachers’ digital skills base and enhance their professional competence
• To show how entrepreneurial skills can be developed and integrated with programming skills

The project objectives are:

• To produce an on-line support package of ideas, activities, materials and downloadable resources for teachers who are teaching coding or programming or who want to.
• To provide CPD courses in a variety of formats and a template and materials for local delivery.
• To establish a dialogue between teachers and programmers, teachers and resource producers, teachers and organisations involved in teaching coding and to act as an agency for exchanges of curricula, ideas and practice.

The project will:

• Develop a website of activities and ideas that teachers can use in the classroom to teach children about coding and programming. These will support diverse curricula across member states and, where there is no formal curriculum, support individual schools and teachers who want to introduce computing / informatics / programming etc in their own practice.
• Develop some affordable resource kits that can be downloaded or for which instructions for making them can be provided on-line. This could result in selling the resource kits after the project as part of the exploitation and sustainability.
• Design and pilot some staff development opportunities and learning resources for teachers who are total newcomers to programming.
• Stimulate a positive attitute towards STEM with young children.
• Test and evaluate existing resources such as the range of software currently available to help children develop programming skills.
• Explore and follow up existing research and projects addressing this issue (e.g work on Tangible User Interface for children.)
• Enter into policy dialogue and inform policy in countries around issues concerning the teaching and learning of programming in schools.