INTRODUCING COMPUTATIONAL THINKING IN ITALIAN SCHOOLS: A FIRST REPORT ON “PROGRAMMA IL FUTURO” PROJECT
Enrico Nardelli, Giorgio Ventre · 2015
In the contemporary society, informatics plays a role similar to that played by mathematics in 19th and 20th centuries and the need of properly educating students in school to the scientific principles underlying information technologies is now widely recognized. In the spring of 2014 we decided with the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research to launch a project to change the way informatics is taught in primary and lower secondary Italian schools. We created a portal through which teachers could access the Code.org courseware and tools, and we produced additional material in Italian specifically designed. We framed the project to schools in term of learning “computational thinking”, to de-emphasize the technical and technological aspects of coding in favour of the logical ones and presented them at the end of September 2014. The response has been enthusiastic: at the end of November 2014 we reached more than 5.000 registered teachers and we had more than 80.000 students completing at least one hour of code.