On Wednesday, January 19th and Thursday, January 20th 2022, the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Organizational Sciences participated in the kick-off meeting of the Erasmus+ KA220-SCH – project titled OOP4FUN – Object Oriented Programming for Fun. The meeting was organized online and hosted by the project coordinator, the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, the University of Žilina.
The 32-month project is funded under the Erasmus + program “Cooperation partnerships in school education” of the European Commission in the total amount of 283.228,00€.
The main project idea is to support secondary schoaols’ teachers of programming courses in their mission of IT education, independently if their students will be the IT experts with HEI education in the future or experts in other fields. Therefore the goals of this project are to create new or upgraded curricula for IT courses and innovative teaching method that includes implementation of agile methods, communication skills, and teamwork, to teach the high school educators how to implement a new curriculum through educational workshops and other educational activities and to develop teaching and learning object oriented programming through game development as a way of motivating both male and female students to work in a team project and increase their interest in object oriented programming and STEM in general.
Although the first meeting had to be held online, the partners managed to achieve the goal of getting to know the partners teams involved and to make the initial project overview and coordination of the project management activities and first project result which will enable them to explore, teach and implement the changes described as project objectives.
In addition to the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Organizational Sciences, the partners of this project include the leading European universities in the field of informatics/computer science and high schools: University of Žilina, University of Zagreb, University of Pardubice, High school Ivanec, Gymnazium Pardubice, Obchodná akadémia Považská Bystrica, the University of Applied Sciences HTW Dresden, Gimnazija Ivanjica and Gymnasium Dresden-Plauen.
Kick off day 2 – January 20th 2022
During the project, the partners will jointly work on 5 main project results and will start by creating an analysis of current state & identification of gaps in (teaching) programming in high schools and Universities, coordinated by Srednja škola Ivanec.
In this project University of Belgrade – Faculty of Organizational Sciences is responsible for the e-learning platform and project result PR4 “Materials for teachers – transfer of experience for current and future teachers”.
Expected impact of this project can be seen through target groups (secondary school teachers, secondary school students), participants and industry, use of modern methods of agile software development and technologies in pedagogical practice following the principles of Education 4.0. This way of teaching will provide students with soft skills to be able to utilize in the fields not related to STEM as well (critical thinking, teamwork, communication, work with information sources, etc.). An increase in motivation of students naturally leads to the raise of their knowledge which will give students a good base for further study in universities.
One of the biggest results of the project is developing modern teaching concept of object-oriented programming which follows modern trends of Education 4.0 based on agile approach, with accessible educational materials for STEM oriented education for every secondary school teacher, attractive concept of teaching and learning and adapted knowledge for future employment in IT companies from Industry 4.0.
The national coordinator of the project is Associate professor of the Faculty of Organizational Sciences Dušan Savić, PhD and more information on the expected results, activities, events, materials and partners involved will be available on the official project website https://www.oop4fun.eu/ and Facebook and LinkedIn of the project.
