Adopt a School!, Romania

Project name: Adopt a School!

Project location: Romania

Website: http://carteadaliei.ro/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/carteadaliei

Project description:

Adopt a School! is a program that brings together IT companies and schools in Romania in a joint effort to improve education by creating a context where students can develop the 21st century skills that enable them to thrive in today's digital world.

21st century skills are a set of abilities that students need to develop in order to succeed in the world today where technology's role is increasing with every year. Coding skills are very important today, but abilities like teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking or creativity are also something needed for any job. We want today's children to fulfill their dreams and be able to pick their own professional path, because they will be the ones that will shape tomorrow!

In order to help children develop these skills we thought of organizing coding clubs in schools in Romania and bring them experienced teachers, like software engineers themselves! The clubs are organized for a period of 3 months in the school's computer lab, where a group of volunteers working in IT go once a week to meet the children and teach them programming concepts, guided by a school teacher. They organize the coding hours by following a guide with proven results, Creative Computing, developed by members of the ScratchEd research team at Harvard Graduate School of Education (http://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/guide/). At the end of these 3 months, the students have the opportunity to show what they have learned in a Game Jam where they are challenged to create stories and games.

What does it mean for a company?
Employees from the company sign up to form a group of volunteers that would go to a school and teach students how to code games. Throughout the school year, the company can perform also other activities involving the school's students, like organize field trips at the company premise or career days at the school.

What does it mean for a school?
A school offers the space to organize the Coding Club: the computer lab. Teachers from the school also learn the basics of programming and they help the volunteers with coordinating the activities.

In the second semester of the school year 2016-2017, an Adopt a School pilot was implemented in Cluj Napoca, Romania. During 3 months, 57 volunteers from 5 companies taught 140 4th graders programming concepts using Scratch. The program ended with a Game Jam where students created stories and games to show what they learned. The students' creations were showcased in a digital exhibition.

Goal and purpose of the project:

The goal of this program is to encourage collaboration between the business environment and the schools in order to offer students a context to develop early on the skills that they need in order to have a successful career. We want to encourage volunteering in the local communities by offering company employees the opportunity to do something that has a direct impact in children's lives.

Motivation of the applicant / applicant team:

We are a group of people working in IT and education in Cluj Napoca, Romania, and we use technology every day. In our jobs we often find ourselves in the situation of having to collaborate with our co-workers, analyze what the cause of a problem could be or finding creative solutions for certain tasks. We know that these abilities are very hard to develop and we can see that we need them more and more to do our jobs well and have a successfull career.

We wanted to help today's students start developing these abilities early on, but when we looked at the education system in Romania we found an old and traditional one, that is not adapted to the needs that children have and not often speaks their language. We decided to change this and use the resources that already exist in the community in order to organize activities in schools that would create a context where children would have access to technology and learn how to use it. The result is a framework where the community resources are the companies and the schools, and the direct benefficiaries are the students. We chose to organize Game Coding Clubs because we know that children just love games, and we chose to organize them in the school's computer lab in order to offer students a different perspective on school, one that would motivate even those that skip a lot or are not encouraged by their families towards education.

During the school year that just ended we organized a pilot Adopt a School! project where 5 companies and 5 schools were involved. At the end of the pilot we have around 30 stories and games developed by the students and we found out that given the right tools, their performance level is similar and factors like school ranking, social status or family background are irrelevant.

We now want to expand the program at national level and offer more children the opportunity to develop skills that would enable them become what they dream of when they grow up, and other volunteers like us the opportunity to have such an impact!

Use of prize money:

The funds will be used for scaling the program at national level: developing an online platform where schools and companies would be able to sign up and be matched together and coordination effort.