One of the main objectives of the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, as defined by the European Union, is to ensure that everyone has the right digital skills (including programming and coding) to thrive in society and on the labour market, where such tools are fundamental for professional, personal and social tasks. Right now, more than 90% of professional occupations require digital competencies. However, this demand is not aligned with the existing offer - there is a major shortage of qualified staff (about 825,000 ICT job vacancies expected this year). This gap is not specific to a particular country; rather, it is evident at a European level calling for interventions to address it towards enhancing sustainable economic growth through human capital, enhancing European competitiveness, reducing unemployment, and promoting social cohesion. In this scenario, there is a need to improve the citizens' skills, especially older adults' competencies, since their digital exclusion prevents them from being fully integrated into the Knowledge and Information Society. This exclusion became even more prominent in the context of the current COVID-19 crisis, which exposed some groups' difficulty in adapting to the new societal challenges. Programming and coding skills allow us to create all types of applications for all digital devices, from casual games to complex atmospheric simulations, from desktop computers to smartphones. Coding is today's literacy, improving skills like problem-solving, teamwork, and analytical thinking and enhancing creativity, teaching people to cooperate across physical and geographical boundaries and to communicate in a universal language (DG Connect, 2020). For adults, studies have demonstrated a positive transfer of coding and programming skills to situations that required creative thinking, mathematical skills, and metacognition, followed by spatial skills and reasoning. This has enormous advantages in a world where adults have to master financial abilities, personal and social management skills, etc. Furthermore, for older adults, it is a way to keep the mind active and maintain cognitive skills, namely attention, working memory, and language processing. In this way, SILVERCODERS (Developing the Creativity of Older Adults through Coding) intends to develop the digital and creative abilities of trainers and adult learners by engaging institutions and organisations in formal, informal, and non-formal education for adults with companies from the creative sector. Doing so intends to provide adults with the necessary tools and competencies to develop creative and innovative solutions to face new risks and challenges, both in personal, educational and professional contexts. This can be important in all sectors of activity, but even more, in the creative and cultural sectors, which could benefit from becoming more digital and modern because this renovation would contribute to making the sector (one of the most hardest-hit ones) more adaptable, resilient, and able to survive and prosper in the current situation and possible future challenges as well. By contributing to the digital literacy of 55+ adults, by equipping them with programming and coding abilities, the project will reinforce their cognitive status and will allow them to acquire or improve their employability skills and adapt them to the current societal challenges. The project will produce the following outputs: 1. A methodological learning framework (IO1) for building coding skills among 55+ adults which will encourage learners to develop their digital and creative abilities based on a "low entry high ceiling approach" that has low knowledge requirements in the beginning and gradually propose more complex challenges. Learners will be exposed to "half baked" scenarios and encouraged to finish partially completed solutions by building blocks of software; 2. A proof-of-concept pilot test (IO2) for building coding skills among 55+ adults; 3. Instructional support content (IO3) in the form of best practice videos, video-lectures and user guides that will facilitate the integration of the proposed methodologies into existing adult training organizations. The project will adopt the Open Badge framework to recognize the acquired skills and competencies of the trainers and the adults. The project will also constitute a pool of experts/trainers with specific competencies and expertise to work as a support community. The project expects to reach directly, in the training stages, about 100 trainers and 350 adults. The multiplier events will be the opportunity to reach at least another 210 stakeholders. through other dissemination actions, the project expects to reach another 3500 adults, setting up conditions for successful replication and future expansion.
The goal of the SILVERCODERS consortium was to promote the independence and empowerment of adults through the mastery of coding and digital technologies, providing them with ubiquitous access to information and communication through digital channels. The project aimed to facilitate practical apprenticeship of these skills and to support the creative potential of the target group, empowering them to respond to present and future professional and personal challenges. To achieve this, the project aimed to strengthen the digital skills of the target group, making them more adaptable to new learning and working environments, and better prepared for the job market and to operating in the Knowledge Society. By doing this, the consortium also expected to enhance the creativity thinking and problem-solving skills of the target group, encouraging the development of innovative solutions for their training. Additionally, the SILVERCODERS consortium integrated trainers of the target group, providing them with the necessary knowledge and confidence to master and use digital tools in their training processes.
The SILVERCODERS initiative aimed to enhance the digital competences of adult learners, enabling them to leverage digital tools and technologies to produce innovative solutions applicable to their personal, educational, and professional contexts. Given that digital competences are now required in over 90% of jobs, upskilling adults in this area is crucial for fostering sustainable economic growth, improving European competitiveness, reducing unemployment, and promoting social cohesion. Consequently, it is particularly imperative to offer digital training to those with lower digital skills, such as adults aged 55+. Learning to code is a specific digital skill that enhances problem-solving, teamwork, analytical thinking, creativity, and cooperation, which can also benefit cognitive skills like creativity and problem-solving, especially in older adults. Although the SILVERCODERS project approach is beneficial in all industries, it is particularly significant in the creative and cultural sectors, which can benefit from digitalization to enhance their adaptability, resilience, and capacity to thrive in the future.