The main purpose of the Campus Party Europe in Berlin is to rewrite the source code of Europe. Both education and entrepeneurship are key to that objective.
Technological advantage
Europe would have a technological advantage if most of its future citizens can read, understand and modify a computer program, specially in today's conditions of:
- broad bandwidth,
- computer ubiquity and
- Software Libre philosophy.
Benefits of programming
- Structured thinking - steps, optimization.
- Abstraction - variables, functionalization of repetitive structures.
- Problem solving - using a set of versatile tools for many situations.
- Methodical approach, but many more times creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
But how?
 |
| Scratch programming environment |
Nowadays there are high level programming environments suitable for children 5+, like Scracth, Alice, RoboMind or Greenfoot. Later, they can try sites like codeacademy, appInventor, Stencyl, GameSalad or Programming Dojo. There is a wide variety of educational programming languages to choose from.
In short...
My idea is to make governments in the European Union consider the inclusion of programming in the standard curriculum from the very early stages, as a game and transversal to all the subjects.
