The CEPIS Informatics Education group strives for the recognition of Informatics as a vital subject in school curricula. It recommends that Informatics be included in school curricula like other subjects such as mathematics, physics and chemistry, and thus provide students with the skills needed to participate in today’s increasingly digital society.
CEPIS is a founding member of Informatics for All, a coalition that aims at getting academia, industry, government and society together to influence education policy in Europe towards the full recognition and establishment of Informatics as a foundational discipline in schools. The other founding members are ACM Europe Council and Informatics Europe. IFIP joined the Coalition in 2020.
Members of Informatics Education expert group participated crucially in the creation of the Informatics Reference Framework for Schools, edited by the Informatics for All Coalition. The future focus of the Coalition will be on Informatics teachers education.
A miniconference devoted to Informatics Teachers Education, Curricula, and Technology in Teaching Informatics, organised by the CEPIS Expert Group on Informatics Education, in cooperation with the Slovak Society for Computer Science, and the Department of Computer Science of Comenius University was held on May 31, 2024 in Bratislava, as one of the events organized at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Department of Computer Science.
As part of the continuous work of CEPIS to build closer ties with the European institutions, CEPIS has been recently appointed by the European Commission to be a member in the new informal Commission expert group for the development of guidelines on high-quality informatics.
On 23 November 2023, the Council of the European Union has adopted a set of recommendations on digital skills and education. The Informatics for All Coalition, a consortium formed to promote informatics education across Europe, of which CEPIS is a founding member, has endorsed the bold recommendations outlined in the new Council report.
The CEPIS Informatics Education (IE) expert group will hold a mini-conference within this year’s edition of The Education in the Light of Information Technologies Conference and Exhibition (BTIE’23). Organised by the Informatics Association of Türkiye (IAT), it will be held In Ankara on 6 and 7 October 2023. IAT is a member of both CEPIS and the IE expert group.
The CEPIS Informatics Education expert group (formerly Computing in Schools SIN) strives for the recognition of Informatics/Computer Science as a vital subject in school curricula. It recommends that Informatics should be included in compulsory school curricula like other subjects such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and thus provide students with the skills needed to participate in today’s increasingly digital society.
The CEPIS Informatics Education (IE) expert group held a mini-conference on teaching informatics to teachers on 11 November 2022 in Milan, Italy. The mini-conference was organised within the scope of the two-day Didamatica 2022 conference, which was organised by the Italian ICT Association (AICA).
The CEPIS Informatics Education expert group strives for the recognition of Informatics/Computer Science as a vital subject in school curricula. It recommends that Informatics should be included in compulsory school curricula like other subjects such as mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and thus provide students with the skills needed to participate in today’s increasingly digital society.
The group meets several times a year, either online, in hybrid (using Zoom) format, or face-to-face. Currently there are eight countries participating in the expert group. Members have backgrounds in Informatics, education and technology.
You can find more information about the group and its priorities and activities in this document.
For the moment, the invitation is open only to CEPIS members.
For more information, contact Prof. Dr. Gerald Futschek, the Chair of the Informatics Education expert group at gerald.futschek@tuwien.ac.at or Tom Scott-Redford (CEPIS Secretariat) at tom.scott-redford@cepis.org.
In 2017, the Slovak Society for Computer Science (SSCS) organised a mini-conference on “Computing in Schools – Past, Present, Future”. The conference focused on issues such as the state of computing in schools in Slovakia and initiatives in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Bulgaria to introduce or improve computing in schools.
Download the conference presentations (.zip file).
In 2016, CEPIS and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) co-organised a mini-conference on “Computational Thinking & Coding at Schools”. The conference focused on issues such as a strategy for introducing computational thinking in schools, ways to assess computational thinking skills, the benefits of learning programming for all, computational thinking in primary and secondary schools and informatics curriculum in British schools, amongst others.
Download the conference presentations (.zip file).
