Informatics Education expert group
The CEPIS Informatics Education group strives for the recognition of Informatics as a vital subject in school curricula. It recommends that Informatics be included in school curricula like other subjects such as mathematics, physics and chemistry, and thus provide students with the skills needed to participate in today’s increasingly digital society.
Activities
Informatics for All Coalition
CEPIS Computing in Schools group is a founding member of Informatics for All, a coalition that aims at getting academia, industry, government and society together to influence education policy in Europe towards the full recognition and establishment of Informatics as a foundational discipline in schools. The other founding members are ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe.
Call for new members
The CEPIS Informatics Education expert group (formerly Computing in Schools SIN) strives for the recognition of Informatics/Computer Science as a vital subject in school curricula. It recommends that Informatics should be included in compulsory school curricula like other subjects such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and thus provide students with the skills needed to participate in today’s increasingly digital society.
The group meets several times a year, either online, in hybrid (using Zoom) format, or face-to-face. The group’s last face-to-face meeting was held in November 2022 at a national conference in Milan, Italy. Currently there are eight countries participating in the expert group. Members have backgrounds in Informatics, education and technology.
You can find more information about the group and its priorities and activities in this document.
For the moment, the invitation is open only to CEPIS members.
For more information contact Prof. Dr. Gerald Futschek, the Chair of the Informatics Education expert group at gerald.futschek@tuwien.ac.at or Tom Scott-Redford (CEPIS Secretariat) at tom.scott-redford@cepis.org.
CEPIS joins partners in promoting computer science education at conference in Brussels
February 2019
On 20 February, CEPIS joined ACM Europe and Informatics Europe (IE) in Brussels to host a gathering of stakeholders invested in the promotion of computer science across Europe. Representatives from both private and public sectors were present, including from the European Commission, to brainstorm key challenges and gather the ideas into a concrete action plan. The goal is to ensure that computer science is properly recognised within the educational systems as an essential foundational discipline for education in the 21st century.
The event was a joint initiative under the ‘Informatics for All’ coalition, which was formed by ACM Europe and IE. CEPIS joined in 2018, becoming the third member of the Coalition.
Informatics for All Coalition Releases New Strategy
March 2018
The Association for Computing Machinery’s Europe Council (ACM) and Informatics Europe have co-developed a new strategy, titled ‘Informatics for All: The Strategy’.
The strategy offers a comprehensive plan to establish informatics as a fundamental subject for students in Europe at all educational levels. The strategy was presented at a panel discussion with leading informatics educators, computer scientists, and European Commission leaders in Brussels on 15 March 2018. Furthermore, CEPIS’s Computing in Schools Chair, Robert McLaughlin, and CEPIS’s Secretary-General, Austeja Trinkunaite, attended the event and expressed their support for this initiative.
The strategy highlights the need to develop a two-tiered approach for establishing informatics in Europe’s educational systems. The first tier of the plan is to set informatics as a specialisation that is considered as a fundamental and independent subject. The second tier of the approach is to integrate informatics with other school subjects. However, more research is needed to determine the appropriate implementation of a full action plan. Furthermore, the coalition approached CEPIS to join as a partner to provide expertise and to help with the implementation of the strategy throughout Europe.
Past activities
Mini-conference on Computing in Schools – Past, Present, Future
In 2017, the Slovak Society for Computer Science (SSCS) organised a mini-conference on “Computing in Schools – Past, Present, Future”. The conference focused on issues such as the state of computing in schools in Slovakia and initiatives in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Bulgaria to introduce or improve computing in schools.
Download the conference presentations (.zip file).
Mini-conference on Computational Thinking & Coding at Schools
In 2016, CEPIS and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) co-organised a mini-conference on “Computational Thinking & Coding at Schools”. The conference focused on issues such as a strategy for introducing computational thinking in schools, ways to assess computational thinking skills, the benefits of learning programming for all, computational thinking in primary and secondary schools and informatics curriculum in British schools, amongst others.
Download the conference presentations (.zip file).
