This initiative has the participation of the Institut de Ciències de l’Educació de la UPC, Barcelona Activa, Anthesis Lavola and the mSchools programme.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) organizes a training course aimed at helping primary school teachers to introduce computational thinking in classrooms. The course offers tools and knowledge that can contribute to promoting scientific-technological vocations among its students. This initiative has the collaboration of the Institut de Ciències de l'Educació (ICE) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona Activa, Anthesis Lavola and mSchools (a programme promoted by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona, in collaboration with the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Barcelona City Council and GSMA). It encourages a didactic and creative use of mobile devices in classrooms and is available to any teacher and school in Catalunya. The registration period is now open by following this link.
The course, entitled "Computational thinking in primary schools: AI, big data and supercomputers", will consist of three sessions of four hours each and will be held on Saturdays 9, 16 and 23 May. In these sessions, which will have a workshop format, some BSC researchers will present concepts such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence, internet of things, simulations or big data, for example. In addition, teachers will participate in a practical workshop where they can experiment with the mSTEAM contents of the mSchools programme, developed in collaboration with the BSC.
In the first session, teachers will become familiar with supercomputing, participating, as if they were students, in one of the visits to the "We are young women researchers" programme that the centre regularly offers to elementary schools and that in the year 2019 5,500 students participated. On the same day, Enric Banda, an expert in scientific policy and a BSC collaborator, will explain to the teachers what a supercomputer is and what applications it has for scientific research. Barcelona Activa will offer a talk on education and new job profiles.
In the second session, the researcher Rosa Badia will bring concepts such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and the internet of things. Researcher Mariano Vázquez will introduce them to the world of simulations for scientific research. Researcher Cecilia Salvoro will explain what bioinformatics is and why supercomputers are needed to do genomic research.
In the last session, teachers will be able to test the experiments and activities included in the mSchools mSTEAM modules, which bring together concepts such as AI, simulations and machine learning in the classroom. Finally, there will be a creative session where teachers can use mSTEAM materials as a basis to create their own educational proposals.
The teachers attending the sessions will obtain the certificate through the computer system of the Department d’Educació de la Generalitat de Catalunya.