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.
CEPIS 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. IFIP joined the Coalition in 2020.
Members of Informatics Education expert group participated crucially in the creation of the Informatics Reference Framework for Schools, edited by the Informatics for All Coalition. The future focus of the Coalition will be on Informatics teachers education.
The European Commission has released four new sets of digital education guidelines designed to empower teachers at the forefront of Europe’s digital transformation. These resources provide practical support for educators working to address online disinformation, navigate artificial intelligence (AI), teach informatics effectively, and make informed decisions when selecting digital learning content.
The competition, launched in 2000 and involving over 250,000 students to date, is organised by the Ministry of Education and Merit in collaboration with AICA – Associazione Italiana per l’Informatica e il Calcolo Automatico, a long-standing promoter of digital skills in Italy and a member of CEPIS.
On 13 – 14 May 2025, the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and CEPIS (Council of European Professional Informatics Societies) hosted a major international symposium in Vienna under the theme “Computer Science in Higher Education.”
The Austrian Computer Society (OCG), together with CEPIS, will be hosting an international symposium titled “Computer Science in Education: By Humans, for Humans” on May 13–14, 2025.
A miniconference devoted to Informatics Teachers Education, Curricula, and Technology in Teaching Informatics, organised by the CEPIS Expert Group on Informatics Education, in cooperation with the Slovak Society for Computer Science, and the Department of Computer Science of Comenius University was held on May 31, 2024 in Bratislava, as one of the events organized at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Computer Science.
As part of the continuous work of CEPIS to build closer ties with the European institutions, CEPIS has been recently appointed by the European Commission to be a member in the new informal Commission expert group for the development of guidelines on high-quality informatics.
The CEPIS Informatics Education expert group 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. Currently there are eight countries participating in the expert group. Members have backgrounds in Informatics, education and technology.
For more information, contact the CEPIS Secretariat at info@cepis.org
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).
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).
