Abstract:

We live at times when we encounter digital technologies daily. We use them for work, study and entertainment. Digital technologies are significantly influencing our lives. They make them easier, but they also make them harder. They bring us many opportunities and challenges, but also some dangers. The 21st century is a century when it isn’t enough to consume media content, but we must know how to work with it. Not only to search for information, but also to process it, to sort it, to distinguish between true and false, to store it, to share it and to create it.

Therefore it is essential that we take care of the digital literacy development already in pre-primary and primary education. Digital literacy is not just the ability to operate digital devices such as mobile phones, tablets and computers, but is a prerequisite for the development of logical and computational thinking, cooperating and problem-solving skills, etc.

Digital literacy is a set of digital competences that students are supposed to achieve at the end of their studies. Teachers are currently facing the challenge of how to transfer these competences to pupils effectively and prepare them for life in the digital word.

The aim of this paper is to present a methodology that contains ideas, activities and teaching examples that serve to develop computational and algorithmic thinking, but also help the digital competence Digital Content Creation. There exist many tools and applications to support the development of computational and algorithmic thinking and to develop digital literacy. This article describes basic guidelines for teachers and helps them to use digital technologies creatively with ScratchJr application.

ScratchJr is a free mobile app which is a simpler version of the well-known visual programming language Scratch. Just like in Scratch, kids can create a variety of interactive multimedia projects such as animations, stories and more.

The methodology itself presents three levels of difficulty, from the simplest activities to the more complex ones, making it suitable for preschool children.

Keywords:

ScratchJr., methodology, digital competences, digital literacy, computational thinking.