Free programming for 120 thousand students and three thousand teachers in Portugal

More than 120 thousand students in Portuguese schools will be able to learn programming for free, as well as three thousand teachers, for whom 200 training grants have already been allocated, through the non-profit organization Code-org.

Created 10 years ago in the United States, the international Code.org movement has now come to Portugal with the aim of expanding the teaching of programming to children and teachers, reports the Santander Portugal Foundation, which is a partner in this project.

Relying on teachers’ participation in this process, the program already has 200 training grants available so teachers can learn the basics of programming and apply them in their classrooms, regardless of the subjects they teach.

All teachers, from preschool to high school, can register at https://exitoeducativo.com/cd/index.pt.php. The project’s goal is to train three thousand teachers over the next three years.

To that end, the Code.org platform offers free content, including 28 online modules that teachers can watch at their own pace and four webinars to help them implement a final classroom project with their students.

The training, accredited by the Training Center of the National Association of Information Technology Teachers, will last 50 hours and will contribute to the career development of teachers, the Santander Foundation guarantees. “As an open and free platform, Code.org is doing its part to repair the social elevator, providing access to everyone and helping to build a more inclusive society.

Programming should increasingly become a language that is learned from a very young age, like other important languages. In the future, we will all need to know how to “speak” a programming language,” said Ines Oom de Souza, President of Fundação Santander Portugal, speaking with Lusa.

There will also be an Hour of Code campaign, consisting of hour-long events that will give kids their first introduction to coding through videos, games and activities.

The idea is to teach children and young people to code, preparing them for the jobs of the future, taking into account the recent World Economic Forum report that 83 million of the current 673 million jobs will be eliminated and that the most in-demand jobs in the future will be in technology field (from data analysts and scientists to big data or artificial intelligence specialists and cybersecurity specialists).

Code.org has several ambassadors, from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Canada’s Justin Trudeau to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg.

Singer Bono, activist Malala, English businessman Richard Branson or executive president of Grupo Santander Ana Botín are other ambassadors of the initiative, which began ten years ago in the United States and today involves more than 80 people. millions of students. According to Santander, there are more than 80 million students registered on the Code.org platform, and more than 100 million have already participated in Hour of Code initiatives around the world.