First Certified Scratch Trainers Completed Training in HTP

First certified Scratch trainers completed a training course in the Hi-Tech Park from August 9-12. The training course is part of the educational project Programming is the New Literacy.

The course was developed by the Educational Center of the Hi-Tech Park.

School and university teachers, trainers of the IT academies of the HTP, and specialists from regional institutes for education development joined the course.

Those who successfully completed the course received special certificates which confirm that the trainer can teach IT ABC and Game Laboratory elective courses within the scope of the project Programming is the New Literacy.

Deputy Director of the Hi-Tech Park Alexander Martinkevich congratulated trainers, thanked all the participants and partners, and noted that elective courses in Scratch are to be launched in a number of schools in September: ”We start low but our goals are global: we are working on creating a new education environment where an active, exploratory teaching and development of logical and algorithmic thinking among younger school students will become an integral part of the curricula.“

When awarding certificates, First Deputy Minister of Education of the Republic of Belarus Vadim Bogush explained: ”As the Hi-Tech Park and the Ministry of Education worked together on the concept of the educational project, we understood quickly that the project is going to be a good instrument to solve a number of tasks in the education system. The project allows working with small children and thus contributing to their progress. And the received skills will be useful to each student, regardless of their future profession.“

During the course, the trainers learned how to organize the educational process using Scratch, studied approaches to planning elective courses in Scratch, and received practical skills of programming in Scratch and working in a team. They also discussed approaches to teaching teachers and senior students majoring in pedagogy within the Programming is the New Literacy project.

Experts of HTP resident companies shared their knowledge during the course. Game Designer at Vizor Games Vladimir Yatsukevich described the stages of game development and role distribution in the development team. Software Engineering Team Leader at EPAM Systems Dmitry Orekhov who attended Scratch@MIT 2016 last week conducted a workshop on algorithms and multithreading in Scratch.

”Communication with representatives of IT companies has been the most useful part of the course for me as they were eager to share their experience of working in Scratch,“ commented Oksana Lovkis, Informatics Teacher at Lida Secondary School No.4. ”We will also need the skills of organizing teamwork. Although the project on teaching programming in Scratch has just started arising in the Grodno region, many teachers are really enthusiastic about it.“

During the last day of the course, trainers developed some parts of classes in Scratch for school students and presented their projects to others.