📋 Tender Overview
At the very dawn of the new millennium, it has been predicted that the 21st century will be turbulent one, characterised by variability, uncertainty, chaos and ambiguity. We are not even over its first quarter, and the prognosis is proving to be more than accurate: Brexit and its consequences, COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, but also the birth of the generative AI, human genome decoded, successful mission to Mars. A human being was never much of an oracle, but now, at least, we are painfully aware of how much we truly don’t know. As educators, what we do know, is that despite of all this lack of clarity, we still need to give our children the skills and tools to succeed in their own times and their own lives. And we know that one of the crucial, if not THE crucial, skill is the ability to understand the digital world. For this, we need strong, modern approaches to teaching informatics. DIGITAL FIRST is exactly that – an attempt to devise a new, innovative pedagogical approach to informatics, which respects the fact that children we teach have been born into the digital world, they do not know any other way: digital is the language they speak, they currency they exchange. We argue that 21st century children are often more fluent in digital language than in their mother tongue. And just like in language acquisition, native speakers learn how to express meaning in a sentence (function) and not how to conjugate verbs (structure), we argue that the same principle should be applied to teaching informatics for digital natives. DIGITAL FIRST will form a European informatics teachers network, animated through a series of dialogue clubs, in which the functional approach will be co-created and co-designed. Piloted in 10 EU countries, together with teacher training catalogues, we believe this high-quality inclusive method to teaching and assessing will help our children become active, responsible and ethical digital EU citizens.
