The Future of Education

According to the current European policy strategy digital skills are relevant for the creation of an inclusive digital society which benefits from the digital single market. These policies foresee the training of European citizens’ digital skills with several initiatives such as the skills agenda for Europe with the aim to help Europe's growth in an increasingly digital society.
However, the disparity between male and female participation in ICT sector is getting more marked at a professional level.
Therefore, one of possible solutions for overcoming this gap and to promote ICT careers is to introduce innovative methodological learning interventions which can favour, further, the development of students’ problem solving and their digital potentialities.
In this context, the promotion of computational thinking (CT), as a support for development of the thinking ability in young people becomes fundamental. This allows students to exploit their creativity and innovation capability through the coding activities which makes computational thinking concepts more concrete and turns them into the tool for an effective learning.
The paper describes the project “Coding4Girls”, co-funded by European Commission under Erasmus+ Programme, aiming to create and validate a learning framework for coding skills development in primary and secondary school’s 10-16 years old students through the design and development of awareness raising serious games in different countries: Slovenia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Croatia, Bulgaria and Portugal.

Keywords: STEM, Design Thinking, Computational Thinking, Serious Games, Inquiry-based learning.

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