Researchers from EEUM and INESC TEC participate in the ENSICO initiative, Association for the Teaching of Computing, which aims to invest in the teaching of Computer Science in Portuguese schools, supporting the creation of innovative practices in the digital age through new teaching tools, materials and learning software.
José Nuno Oliveira, senior researcher at the High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) and Pedro Rangel Henriques, lecturer at the Informatics Department of EEUM, are two of the founders of this initiative, which aims to teach this area of science to the youngest and before arriving in Higher Education. “It is late to teach only Computing in universities”, defends José Nuno Oliveira.
With a vast experience in activities aimed at primary and secondary school students related to Computer Science, José Nuno Oliveira, together with the rest of the team, bets on an “unplugged” approach, in which the means are only paper and pencil. “To start teaching Computer to young people, it is not necessary to use the computer. It will only distract them from the essential”, says José Nuno Oliveira.
In this initiative, the main function of the EEUM/INESC TEC team is the production of didactic contents for the classes, which are given by students from FEUP and EEUM, as well as by the Portuguese Youtuber Inês Guimarães, who created a channel on Youtube and launched a challenge book to demystify mathematics.
In partnership with the Porto City Hall, ENSICO started in October the teaching of the subject of Computing in three schools in the city – schools of the Garcia de Orta Grouping of Schools, the Cerco do Porto Grouping of Schools and Nossa Senhora de Lourdes College at the 2nd and 3rd cycle levels.
With a time horizon of three years, ENSICO aims to reach new schools on the mainland and islands and aims to promote computer thinking as a pedagogical practice for all students in primary and secondary education, with a view to promoting digital literacy and ethics, based on the field of Computer Science.
SOURCE: INESC TEC