The partners wanted to give adult learners the opportunity to acquire coding skills that can help them in their personal development. For many adults acquiring coding skills is difficult and confusing. The question where to start is not easy to answer. We provided a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in which learners can gain basic coding skills for free. MOOCs have become widely accepted in education and in 2018 the number of learners using MOOCs has crossed 100 million. Our MOOC takes learners from the beginning to a solid understanding of coding and gives them plenty of opportunities to practice, offering highly relevant exercises that are practical in everyday life and help the learners to learn computational thinking and how to program. Learners can start the MOOC without any previous knowledge about coding, as it covers the basics. We ran several courses based on our MOOC.
Programming is an amazing tool that affects our daily life in so many ways. Programs can control robots that explore the surface of the planet Mars or help care for elderly people. Computers have evolved and have become part of not only almost everyone’s work life but also of almost every other aspect of life such as entertainment, health, finances, shopping, traveling, etc. They are in our phones, our watches, our cars, our home appliances, our entertainment systems, and even in our work tools. In all EU countries, we have a rising demand for skilled workers who can program computers; however, the gap between the skills needed and those with the skills is growing every year. As our societies are flooded with new technology every year the importance of knowing how to code becomes more and more apparent. We see growing opportunities for those who have at least a basic understanding of coding skills. Computational thinking and programming skills are not only very important key competences everyone should learn nowadays, they are also essential for an increasing amount of jobs in today's economy which is why we wanted to help learners acquire programming skills amd career orientation in this project.