Code Hero

To combat the negative effects of interrupted education due to COVID-19, we created Code Hero, a program that enabled children to continue their learning journey and offered them an online context to develop the skills that they need for their future

Abstract

At the beginning of 2020, people from the entire world were confronted with something that the vast majority of us did not understand and have never thought we’d see in this lifetime: a global pandemic. As a result, entire country populations have been forced into a mass lockdown in their own homes.

With the school closures, in Romania 2.6 million children were forced to isolate at home. For the vast majority of them, this meant that they stopped learning, as at least 32% of students enrolled in formal school education didn’t have at home the technology necessary to learn online and 12% didn’t have connectivity at all (IRES 2020).

Interrupting education services has serious, long-term consequences for economies and societies such as increased inequality, poorer health outcomes, and reduced social cohesion. Children from the poorest households are already almost five times more likely to be out of primary school than those from the richest. These negative impacts will be significantly higher for marginalized children.

To combat the negative effects of interrupted education, we created Code Hero, a program that enabled children to continue their learning journey and offered them an online context to develop the skills that they need for their future. Children between 9 and 13 years old are currently learning skills such as creativity, critical thinking or problem-solving through coding, by creating animations, stories, and games in Scratch, a visual programming language created especially for them.

Their mentors are volunteers working in technology, who meet with them for 1 hour per week in an online conference, over a period of 4-5 months. The volunteers who answered the call of helping children are not only from Romania but also from the Romanian Diaspora in Europe, in countries such as Spain, Denmark or the UK.

Target Group

Marginalised young people and children

Country

Romania

Website

Link to web site

Stakeholders involved

Children aged 9 – 13, volunteers who mentor students, sponsors and partners.

Further Information

See web site

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Inspirational	1
Innovative	1
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