Background The European Commission’s Rethinking Education initiative has identified the need ‘to scale-up use of ICT in learning and teaching’ to exploit the opportunities that the digital revolution presents for enhancing education. It calls for innovation, work to define 'how, when and where ICT can be used effectively in pedagogical and assessment approaches’ and activities to support teachers and learners to increase their digital competence. We have been trying to do our best to ensure the appropriate environment for our students to gained the mentioned targets but we needed to do something in a wider perspective, with a bigger scale. Hence the idea of CODE-E has emerged and nourished from this critical need. Rationale One of the primary aims for an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership is "enhancing the quality and relevance of the learning offer in education, training and youth work by developing new and innovative approaches and supporting the dissemination of best practices". The proposed partnership, led by Sarıyer Ortaokulu, propose to form a Strategic Partnership of pedagogical parties with the aim of further developing, trialling, evaluating and disseminating a novel framework for ‘creating knowledge and solving conceptual problems with the support of digital tools’ (cf. the digital competence of the same name identified in EC DIGCOMP). We shall apply the principles and tools for a computing practice that enables educators and learners to collaborate in creating live interactive resources that serve as personal, shareable understandings. Such a practice is more accessible than conventional computing practices but more expressive and powerful. Its adoption will lead to the online development of open educational resources that can be flexibly modified by educators and learners alike to give exceptionally rich support for blending educational practices combining instruction and construction. The proposed partnership allows for the project to draw on a unique blend of skills and experience, and to access opportunities to trial and disseminate the activity through two learning activities. Each partner school has a different degree of experience and each country embeds coding into cirriculums with different aspects of the practice in and out of the classroom, therefore we aim to use these variety of focal points to enrich the project experience for all the partners. Objectives and Activities The principal objective of our project is to promote code writing as a relatively new practice that promises to support teachers and learners to create knowledge and solve conceptual problems with the support of digital tools. As the framework has potential to address significant objectives, challenges and needs relevant to several fields of education, our proposal is to form a Strategic Partnership covering more than one field. The core activities of the Strategic Partnership will be to: • Develop and refine the existing cirriculum and tools, drawing on the pedagogical and technical experiences of our partnership thorough the project activities. • Apply the cirriculumin some specific educational contexts with a range of learners to explore and test its potential to enhance the teaching of computing/programming and other subjects • Refine the framework and tools in light of its application in educational contexts and launch it as an open educational resource • Conduct experimental studies to evaluate the efficacy of the cirriculum for supporting learning • Dissemination of the framework and tools as mentioned below. Expected Outcomes • The widespread adoption of code writing practice as a new digital skill to support personal learning and collaborative programming as way of developing open educational resources. • Greater awareness of the impact of the various tools of program writing in terms of boosting creative thinking Dissemination The results of the project will be disseminated via activies including development of a project website, presentations/publications to the transnational meetings, online publications and presentations through social and contemporary media, the Erasmus+ project results platform. These channels will be exploited during the lifetime of the project to increase awareness of the activity and encourage wider contribution and support for the project. The open online course created/prepared by the teachers will serve both to educate the students and other learners and to disseminate the concept of code writing in local, national and international scales. The leaflets in local languages will be used to create awareness about the activities taking place at schools locally and nationally. The links with professional bodies will ensure to reach a wider sphere of influence and finally the live coding music performances for the parents and local visitors will provide a local effect.
The European Commission’s Rethinking Education initiative has identified the need ‘to scale-up use of ICT in learning and teaching’ to exploit the opportunities that the digital revolution presents for enhancing education. It calls for innovation, work to define 'how, when and where ICT can be used effectively in pedagogical and assessment approaches’ and activities to support teachers and learners to increase their digital competence. We tried to do our best to ensure the appropriate environment for our students to gain the mentioned targets but we needed to do something in a wider perspective, with a bigger scale. Hence the idea of CODE-E had emerged and nourished from this critical need. We sticked to the goal of "enhancing the quality and relevance of the learning offer in education, training and youth work by developing new and innovative approaches and supporting the dissemination of best practices". The partnership that was led by Sarıyer Ortaokulu, formed a Strategic Partnership of pedagogical parties with the aim of further developing, trialling, evaluating and disseminating a novel framework for ‘creating knowledge and solving conceptual problems with the support of digital tools’ (cf. the digital competence of the same name identified in EC DIGCOMP). We have applied the principles and tools for a computing practice that enables educators and learners to collaborate in creating live interactive resources that serve as personal, shareable understandings. Such a practice has been more accessible than conventional computing practices but more expressive and powerful. Its adoption has lead to the online development of open educational resources that can be flexibly modified by educators and learners alike to give support for blending educational practices, combining instruction and construction. The partnership let the project to draw on a unique blend of skills and experience, and to access opportunities through two learning activities. The partner organizations had had a different degree of experience and each country had embeded coding into cirriculums with different aspects of the practice in and out of the classroom, therefore we have used these variety of focal points to enrich the project experience for all the partners and participants. We all utilized the different focal points and exercises that we have applied in different educational environments with different backgrounds. Sarıyer Ortaokulu started with 6 teachers and 30 students in the beginning but in the second year of the project about 180 students received coding classes in 6 different groups after school hours. 12 students joined the LTT activities in 2 different countries but the whole coding club received the training they had received after the LTT visits. This year the coding classes are going on with about 200 hundred students with the support of the parents and the school. The widespread awareness about the advantages of coding literacy has been so fruitful that we plan to keep the classes and enable more and more students have the opportunity to receive same kind of education in a public school which is still exceptionally rare in Turkey. The principal objective of our project was to promote code writing as a relatively new practice that promises to support teachers and learners to create knowledge and solve conceptual problems with the support of digital tools. As the framework had had the potential to address significant objectives, challenges and needs relevant to several fields of education, our proposal was to form a Strategic Partnership covering more than one field. The core activities of the Strategic Partnership was to be and has had been to: • Develop and refine the existing cirriculum and tools, drawing on the pedagogical and technical experiences of our partnership thorough the project activities. We have written our own cirriculum adopting the existing cirriculums to our specific student profiles, needs, trainers’ objectives counting on our three-term teaching experiences with our students. • Apply the cirriculum in some specific educational contexts with a range of learners to explore and test its potential to enhance the teaching of computing/programming and other subjects. We have used our own cirriculum in different subjects with different age group students and test the usabilty and sustainability of the teaching materials that we have prepared and developed them according to our students’ needs. We have produced a report under the light of our experiences. • Refine the framework and tools in light of its application in educational contexts and experimental studies to evaluate the efficacy of the cirriculum and launch it as an open educational resource. We have prepared an open online tutorial in the form of a presentation besides the cirriculum under the light of our teaching experiences and released them in the website of the project and Project Results Platform.