pSkills

Welcome to pSkills project site

pSkills is a two-years project co-funded by the European Commission under the Life Long Learning Programme, Comenius Sub-programme. It started on 1st October 2009 and it will finish on 30th September 2011. The aim of the project is to enable computer science teachers in secondary education exploit modern educational programming languages in the context of student-centered pedagogical settings in order to contribute to making their courses effective, creative and attractive.

The conceptual baseline of the project is the recognition of the fact that programming is a core competence for advanced computer literacy. Modern information systems and applications of all kinds are integrated with programming/scripting languages to allow advanced usage and adaptation.  Programming skills are also necessary to exploit the extensibility of open source software. Finally, there is a need to ensure that talented young people are attracted to computer science/engineering departments to ensure the competitiveness of EU ICT industry.

The project aims at making programming courses in secondary education viable, attractive and effective by leveraging recent advances in education programming languages. It will develop appropriate curricula, collect and adapt the most appropriate education programming language environments, develop teachers' training material and students' training material and test it in the context of appropriate training scenarios. Exploiting a modern eLearning infrastructure, it will also provide a uniform access point to the above tools and materials so that they can be efficiently used in traditional classroom activities.  In particular the project will develop appropriate curricula both for teachers training and for students taking into account the current situation in the secondary educational system of EU countries and the need to harmonize them with the i2010 objectives. These will be based on appropriate pedagogical strategies based on constructivism / problem-solving / game-based learning approaches. It will also produce specific proposals for adaptation of the educational systems from the perspective of programming skills development. 

The project has a clear focus on exploiting state of the art pedagogical approaches and learning technologies in order to facilitate the EU objectives of creating a competitive IS  focusing on the development of programming skills of the EU workforce that are necessary not only for future computer professionals but for also for all knowledge/information workers.

Visit the pSkills Multimedia Open Learning Environment

All training material being developed in the context of pSkills will be available from the project's Multimedia Open Learning Environment (MOLE). MOLE is also the environment that is used for the delivery of in-service training to computer science teachers in secondary education that participate in the experimentation phase of the project. The pSkills Affiliate Network is also supported by MOLE.