Coding for Amsterdam

Bringing coding lessons into the school curriculum and making sure that schools know the importance of these skills.

What was/is the challenge?

We live in a time when technology is rapidly changing the world around us. There is a transformation from an industrial to an information society. A huge number of vacancies in technology companies remain unfulfilled: a so-called ‘war on talent’ prevails. This transformation has a huge impact on the way we live, learn and work and without a doubt, it requires children to acquire new “21st-century skills”.

What is the project?

Vision & mission
All children must be prepared for the future in which digital skills are needed to create an excellent business climate for startups, among other things.

Coding for Amsterdam’ mission is to create awareness at primary schools about the urgency to adapt school curriculum to the modern-day need for digital skills and facilitate this change.

Execution
The project is organized and managed in stages, which are essential to follow. First of all, it is crucial to learn about state of the art of the education providers and including the city education department, schools in the city, private education providers and other stakeholders related to the education sector. Meeting and researching the needs of these stakeholders gives you an advantage of information about specific needs and wants as well as the supply of ideas and funds for the organisation of the project.

The second stage is the survey of local primary schools. In the absence of formal bodies representing schools in the city/region we called up and had a conversation with every school representative individually. The main agenda of our discussion was “What prevents them from introducing digital skills classes/digital education in the curriculum? “What are their priorities?” and “How we can incentivise and help these institutions resolve their challenges and bring digitalisation to primary schools?”

After surveying educational institutional the next step is coming up with the project plan that would meet the stated needs. This could be one big project or smaller initiatives for schools, kids, or teachers.

1. One of such projects should be aimed at educating existing primary teachers about the relevance of digital skills and ways how they can be introduced into the primary school curriculum.
2. The city can also set up digital skills classes and workshops at schools or universities at Educational Departments for students who are studying to become teachers.
3. Re-educating interested programmers/IT specialists into primary schools teachers is another mini-project which we successfully piloted. 2. Laptop donation by big IT firms, corporates. For this cause, we partnered up with ABN AMRO.
3. Organizing game workshops for kids.

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