Abstract:

The contribution will describe an experimentation lead in an Italian class of a second year of secondary school (ISI Malignani, a technical school, in Udine), using interdisciplinary coding lessons, to introduce DigComp framework into curricular lessons. The objective was to develop digital competency as described in DigComp, into formal education involving computational thinking into different topics.

This experience has been led by a group of three teachers that worked together using coding to design interdisciplinary lessons. The whole process was supported by Indire providing worksheets and designing tools. The teachers build an expertise and created a method to design coding lessons that let the students act into a proper problem solving situation, in which students need to collaborate to analyze and create algorithms to solve the problem: students work in groups, creating artifacts with scratch as solutions to the posed problem, and present the results to the class. Students’ learning path was richer than the bare sum of the involved topics so we decided to search for a paradigm to describe this complexity. Digital competence and consequently DigComp framework provided that paradigm. So we decided to apply this method to create curricular interdisciplinary coding lessons using DigComp framework to evaluate students.

The first step was to study DigComp 2.2 to identify which competences was more appropriate for our topics, and then teachers started to search for a content-object that could keep together topics, coding and digital competence, in a way that students could solve some sort of problem that, at the same time, could be understandable.

So that was the beginning of the case we will describe in the paper. Teachers and researchers had several online meetings to discuss how to develop the lessons and how to evaluate students. Once the lessons was developed and lead in the classes researchers had two interviews to two different groups of students to investigate their opinion about the lessons, and what they learnt about digital competence.

The results were interesting both because of the impact on students’ competences, that improved, but more about the adopted method had on students’ perceptions about school purposes and their own vision, and their acquired yet learning methods: students perceived our proposal as far from the traditional schooling, and felt more uncomfortable to learn that way. They told they have to be more active to decide how to study and, if it is interesting, it is at the same time more time consuming. But the main question they posed is about all the other school subjects where the teachers act traditionally. It is hard for them to study the way we proposed for some subject, and in “the old way” for all the others. Which conclusions then? Seems that innovation we proposed could work better if it would be more pervasive, and progressive and limited adoptions could not provide fully satisfying results. And students tend to be conservative, especially in secondary school, so any new approach need to be discussed with them.

Keywords:

DigComp, computational thinking, secondary education.