Abstract:

The contribution will describe the initial work we led to write indication for computational curriculum in Italian first cycle schools (from six years to fourteen years old students). This work is part of a larger project we are leading with fourteen schools located in Italian’s Umbria region, supported by Umbria’s regional detached office of Ministry of Education (called Ufficio Scolastico Regionale Umbria, USR).

Contextualizing the project, one must know Italy has not a National Curriculum, but National Indications all the schools have to follow autonomously to develop their autonomous curriculums. Then teachers are constitutionally free to teach as they decide to do, and they can participate in their school curriculum’s development.

In these last years, Ministry of Education, European Indication and funding, and commercial stakeholders push schools toward innovation using technology into their lessons and developing pupils’ computational thinking. Both private and public stakeholders provided many courses for teachers, so more and more teachers were trained into coding and robotics and technology enhanced teaching. But these courses had not a common defined background, and at the same time could have many different objectives: from more technology oriented courses, to ones more pedagogic oriented, teachers could have studied the same technological topic in very different ways and unfortunately even with conflicting meaning. One should consider, for example how difficult it is to define uniquely computational thinking (as in Reviewing Computational Thinking, the report JRC provided in 2022 for European Commission) unequivocally or how many resources (money, time, persons) the EU spent to provide frameworks to have a shared and operational definition of digital competence.

It is true more or less in every EU nation, but in Italy we have further flexibility both from schools’ autonomy and teachers’ freedom of teaching as described shortly above. So, in this situation there are many teachers adopting robotics and coding, even in the same school, without any organized path from a year to another, and from a teacher to another. Some school principals try to support teachers, designing coding and robotic curriculums, getting good results in terms of early introduction of programming competences between students, with good impacts on traditional curriculum. But these results are mostly perceived from the teachers than measured in some ways. As Indire (Italian National Institute working for Schools’ innovation) we led a project (between 2019 and 2021) with about one hundred teachers in different schools, asking them to introduce coding and robotics into curricular lessons. We analyzed the teachers’ projects (no direct observation, because the covid restrictions) and interviewed a selection of the participants teachers, and we found that schools that organized in any way a sort of coding and or robotic curriculum, produced better projects in terms of complexity and number of declined subjects.

We concluded that providing structured indications for curriculums, could be very helpful for teachers and schools that want to decline curriculum into coding and robotic. So, in collaboration with USR Umbria, selected fourteen schools having experiences and tools, to develop with us indication, and write their own computational curriculum.

We will describe our first proposal of indications and in which way we present it to the participating schools.

Keywords:

Coding, robotics, curriculum.