Online Learning Facilities to Support Coding and Robotics Courses for Youth

Nowadays programming and computational skills are of great importance in working and social life. Knowing how to code is empowering. It allows to understand the digital world we live in and to shape it. Basic coding skills are essential for accessing the jobs of today and tomorrow and for achieving a better skills-match between education and the labor market. This paper presents a European Project entitled “Coding and Youth: An innovative program in the digital era” (Code@Youth), which attempted to utilize constructively the long period of summer vacations in European countries in order to introduce students to the world of programming and robotics by offering hybrid learning activities in parallel with on-line learning facilities. The main purpose of this program was to plan, implement and evaluate these activities for young people, through the on-line platform, in order to lead to the acquisition, recognition and validation of computational skills obtained through non-formal learning.