Abstract:

There is a growing debate about the need to develop innovative teaching and learning approaches in order to address the needs for qualification and requalification of professionals to meet the challenges of the future of work. Learning in the increasingly digitalized economies is a lifelong activity, spanning the spheres personal life and work. The development of competences to face digital contexts is advanced in public debates and policy agendas as key for personal development, active citizenship, employment and inclusion. Such personal development goes beyond basic literacy on information and communication technologies, and involves qualifying individuals to achieve higher-order skills to live and work and make decisions. As we witness an unprecedented accumulation of data the personal and professional worlds become increasingly “computational and programmable”. Likewise, the future of work, consumption, including the management of individual affairs (e.g. health, finance, education, etc.) will become intrinsically dependent on our abilities for using such data for decision making.

In this paper we build on the current debates about the future of work and competences, and we offer a review of the discussions concerning the growing demands for the development of capabilities related with computational thinking, highlighting arguments about its applications and it overall relevance for employment across different industries and professions. Building on the acknowledgement of the urging needs for the qualification and reskilling of individuals, notably in what concerns logic and computational thinking, the paper presents a an interactive tool that has been developed by the research team for enabling the learning experiences for acquiring competences on coding in an engaged, flexible and creative manner – piBook.

piBook is an authoring application to produce programmable interactive books - piBooks - that allows users to produce content on topics of their own choice, while facilitating the acquaintance of learners with tools that involve advanced ICT skills such as computer programming tools. piBooks are composed of sequences of linked pages that contain different elements, and the book flow is defined by user while setting, at his own choice i.e. narrative a sequence of links between pages. A core innovativeness of the tool is related with its potential to reach audiences that are not the typical ICT profiles. Using story telling has the potential of engaging people from diverse areas of knowledge such as humanities, social sciences, engineering, etc. The proposed interface is suitable to be used on tablets and the colorful environment helps also to capture the attention of younger public. Such user friendliness is particularly relevant to address the qualification and requalification demands in the European demographic scenario as the number of people graduating from universities is expected to decline, and the working age population is actually on a downward trend (the prospects are for a reduction in the order of 6 million, in the period between 2007 and 2020). This scenario is leading to pressures for increases in labor market participation, notably for women as well as for the reintegration/requalification of unemployed and immigrant populations. piBook tool offers a timely contribute for introducing key and advanced ICT concepts, and logical reasoning, to vaster audiences supporting the qualification for the digital era.

Keywords:

Computational thinking, active learning, coding.