On February 19, the Unlocking the Code project kicked off. The project is implemented by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ together with Academy of Innovative Education and Development, with the information support of the Smart Internet Foundation (.ДЕТИ domain) and the Study the Internet & Govern It project.
In the next five months, children and their mentors will study programming in Python, listen to lectures on digital literacy, internet architecture and the structure of the domain industry, as well as take part in career guidance workshops.
Boarding schools, orphanages, small and rural schools from 10 regions of Russia: Volgograd. Leningrad, Murmansk, Rostov, Samara and Chelyabinsk regions, Primorye and Altai territories, Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Area, and the Republic of Tatarstan took part in the first wave of the Unlocking the Code.
“Many will ask: what are the innovations of the Unlocking the Code program, while there are many programming courses? Our project is unique because it uses teacher + students teams in the training process, and the transfer of knowledge is spiraling: the Unlocking Code tutors teach the teacher the skills of organizing programming classes; and then the mentors pass on the acquired knowledge to their students, complete test assignments with them and prepare for the final defense of graduation projects. We also teach programming using mini-projects, which makes it possible to try your hand in practice from the very first lesson,” said Ilona Yuryeva, the project’s curator and teacher.
Thus, the Unlocking the Code have at least two goals: to help improve teachers’ professional skills in teaching IT technologies and programming, and to increase the chances of successful socialization and professional development of graduates of orphanages, boarding schools, small and rural schools.
“This is the Coordination Center’s second approach to the training process of the personnel reserve, including for the domain industry. We held a large programming course for children from a boarding school in the Tula Region. The experience was successful, but the scale was not large enough. The Unlocking the Code made it possible for us to extend the project almost to every region of Russia. Studying the secrets of the code can help realize that programming is not scary or complicated, but very fun. It is a chance to try it and choose the future career,” said Andrey Vorobyev, director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
In addition to programming, the project participants will have lectures on the structure and architecture of the internet, the hierarchy of the domain industry, management processes and the internet internationalization. CCTLD Social Project Manager Viktoria Bunchuk described this:
“Lectures can be found on the GetCourse platform, where you can listen to them together with the students at your convenience until March 31 and then complete a small homework assignment to learn the tools of our digital literacy project, Study the Internet & Govern It by solving several tests and taking an offline quiz.”
Viktoria also noted that there will be several workshops created by the Coordination Center among the career guidance ones. One of them will be dedicated to domain investment, domain valuation methods and the secondary domain market, and the second to the creation of 2D and 3D graphics using a promotional video about the Study the Internet & Govern It project as an example.
Following the course, teachers who succeed in the program and in passing the skills they received on to their students will receive a Certificate of Advanced Training and a methodological manual on how to carry a course on the basics of programming and the internet. After the training, schoolchildren will be able to program in the Python language, get a certificate of completion, participate in the Olympiad of graduation projects, and win prizes from the project organizers.
