Abstract:

Coding is a powerful instrument to include and integrate the different learning styles and the cognitive peculiarities of every student: writing clear and unequivocal instructions, using a machine language and working with a concrete tool lead students to be more synthetic, accurate and conscious about their own learning process. Coding lessons motivate student to learn scientific disciplines, overcoming those emotional factors obstructing a fertile experience of school.

Because of the advantages offered, Coding has been fully introduced in ministerial programs in Italy as a discipline: it is not only an “innovative subject” for pedagogy in theoretical terms, but it requires schools to rapidly and effectively comply with reforms implemented since 2014. OECD TALIS 2013 data confirms teachers need training, as they are required to teach and use Coding as a school discipline but they do not have the required competences: based on this, in 2015 the first project was launched to introduce Coding in the Italian Schools.

However, the current training paths offered to educators, in Italy and abroad, present several shortcomings, particularly in poor timing, absence of evaluation moments and, consequently, lack of tools for analysis of results.

In order to overcome these critical issues, we propose and describe the design of a training course addressed to educators. This path is tailored to meet the real needs and the characteristics of the recipients, it refers to a rigorous design method and it is able to quantify the actual skills' increase of the subjects. This method could support the teachers in organizing educational interventions, avoiding the use of improvisation, increasing the internal validity of the course and allowing replication in other contexts.

First of all, we provide the state-of-the-art overview of the Coding projects launched in Italian schools: method, structure, monitoring data and first results. Then, we identify the best practices and the lesson learned, which are summarized in a guideline. We finally propose a course path, observing some important quality criteria to self-evaluate the quality of our work. In particular, we apply three main quality indicators:
1. Quality of the design:
a) preliminary analysis,
b) macro-planning and
c) micro-planning;
2. Quality provided:
a) pre-delivery and
b) delivery;
3. Quality of the results’ evaluation:
a) evaluation and
b) reporting.

The course design consists of two essential moments:
I) A first phase, macro-design, which illustrates the general structure of the course.
The three main outputs of this phase are:
1. the conceptual map, which has been created to identify the conceptual nodes and the main contents of the course;
2. the tree of didactic objectives, each of one is defined according to the Bloom and Anderson complexity level method: we also list the main assessment tests, consistent with the level of Bloom's Taxonomy;
3. a flowchart, defining the logical structure, the rules and the time scanning;
II) A second phase, micro-design, which describes the storyboard of the classroom and the rating storyboard.

Following this method, we believe teachers could put in practise programs which are tailored to their particular class. Going through different experimentations, teachers could also promote the use of coding in interdisciplinary domains that are not yet coded, also supporting research in this field.

Keywords:

Coding, training, educators, computational thought, innovation, school, training trainer.