On September 29, four days after the vote, one delegation of officials from the European Union he will go to the Ministry of Education to ask what we have done in recent years to introduce computational thinking in compulsory schooling.
When they told me, last Monday, during a conference at the CNR who presented a study on the subject, it was like taking a leap in time. What happened to the battles to bring, already in elementary school, lessons and workshops that would help children to become familiar with robots, computers, programming? Help them to grow with the awareness of how the world really works in which we live? For example, to understand, playing, what is an algorithm?
Yet ten years ago a wind of innovation seemed to have infected the school world: there was a word, coderdojo, which indicated those teachers who autonomously, without waiting for anything or anyone, and without asking for anything in return, had started to manage workshops of this type with great success. It was a revolution that I witnessed closely. I remember that at the first Maker Faire in Rome, in 2013, we dedicated an entire pavilion to the theme and it was literally stormed by families. And one day, in 2014, we organized a laboratory inside the Chamber of Deputies, to show our representatives what it was: that day a little girl played the hymn of Mameli using fruits on which sensors had been connected. Many were moved. Someone introduced a bill (the current president of the CNR, Maria Chiara Carrozza). And that was it.
Meanwhile, Europe has moved: the first was Slovakia, then France and England also changed the school curricula, a very large trial is underway in Denmark. And in Italy? We plan to do so. We have been planning to do this for 10 years. Will the next government be able to do it?