Computer literacy is a major issue in the training of tomorrow's adults who will have to participate in a society where technology is increasingly present. However, compulsory education in many European countries has only been introduced very recently and only at the draft stage. The European Commission, aware of the major challenges of digital and computer science education, has designed the DigComp reference framework of digital competencies for citizens. With a similar objective, the Walloon-Brussels Federation of Belgium and France are currently defining reference frameworks for computer science education in compulsory education. In this context, the issue of teacher training is important. There is a need to support existing teachers who are not initially trained in computer science but who are and will be required to teach this subject. Initial teacher training will also have to be adapted to take account of this.
In this framework, the objective of the CAI Community project is hence to develop and share pedagogical and technological tools to support the emergence of a community of computer science teachers who, starting from their previous training which often did not concern computer science, will feel able to teach this new discipline (in particular the 4 fundamental concepts: data, algorithms, languages, machines including the connected objects and networks). The project consolidates the partners' innovative resources and tools in the field of computer science education to work on the development of a computer science learning community. The primary target school level is young people between 10 and 18 years old and their teachers. In particular, the project aims to improve interactions between teachers in order to better build and structure the computer science teaching offer, both in terms of resources, methods and experiences.
Technological tools will be exploited at two levels: on the one hand, computer science is the object of learning, but on the other hand, computer science tools will allow to animate a learning community by connecting learners in a common will.
As a "galaxy" of large IT learning communities co-constructed in a network setting, the CAI Community is nowadays a great relay and resource centre for approaching all the aspects of computational thinking and programming, with the objective of empowering more and more teachers and educators regarding these topics!
Discover the resources here.
Contact: cai-contact@inria.fr