European Commission
EU Code Week 2019
Over 50 people who are at the forefront of the EU Code Week grass-root initiative started their meeting together with the European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel. She thanked them for the hard work during the successful 2018 edition and recalled the goal of reaching 50% of all schools in Europe by 2020.
Then the ambassadors and education coordinators dived into analysing key success factors from 2018. The participants underlined the role of partnerships with public and private institutions, the good experience of working closely with teachers or the need to offer something special and original during the events. Later in the afternoon, the participants split into smaller groups and discussed how to better work together across borders, create more learning materials or link with other national initiatives.
The second part of the meeting was about looking forward towards 2019. The participants proposed actions to involve more girls in coding, introduce game jams or hackathons, provide certificates for participating teachers or link coding with cooking.
The group met the first Vice-President of the Committee of the Regions Markku Markkula who invited event organisers to work more closely with European regions and informed the participants about the recent letter that was sent to all members of the Committee calling them to encourage schools to take part in Code Week.
The Ambassadors and Edu coordinators also got the chance to work together on a concrete action plan for the upcoming months. At the end they created a common mindmap that should help organisers to prepare attractive and engaging EU Code Week 2019 activities. The pictures from the meeting are available on Code Week's Facebook page.
For anyone interested in the campaign, EU Code Week website offers more information, news and resources. It also helps teachers and education experts to bring more coding to schools.
Those who want to organise a workshop, coding session or an offline coding activity can follow this simple guide and pin their events on the EU Code Week map. The website also offers brand new overview of resources for those who want to learn and those who want to teach how to code.