EU Code Week ends with a new record in activities

Publication date: October 26, 2021

More than 73,650 coding activities had been added to the map, as of 25 October, breaking last year’s record of 73.013 events. And the numbers will keep rising until the end of this year, with the support of the enthusiastic coding community. 

According to the community’s Menti word cloud, EU Code Week is “great”, “fun”, “creative”, “exciting”, “collaboration”, “inspiring”, “future.”  These adjectives apply to coding itself, as well as to our challenges, activities, and the many organisers who made them possible.  

While planning the celebration to wrap-up EU Code Week 2021, the goal was to highlight the real stars of this initiative: from local Ambassadors to very creative teachers, and from Hackathon winners to study group leaders, all of them were just a few of the many valuable members of this community, who managed to organise over 73,650 activities so far this year.

EU Code Week Ambassadors Adil Tuğyan from Turkey, Grzegorz Zajackowski from Poland and Bernadette Zerafa from Malta agreed on the three keys to success for their national editions of this year’s Code Week: Good planning, good relationship with organisers, and good social media. Each one, with their resources and the support of their local community has managed to involve different sectors of the society, beyond the teachers and schools, who still represent the backbone of Code Week. 

Through webinars, associations with private and public institutions and the launch of a summer teacher training school in Malta, each of these Ambassadors reached new people and made the expansion of coding in the schools possible.  

Teacher Sandrine Khorn from Monaco highlighted that having coding as part of the academic curricula, from kindergarten to secondary school, plays a significant role in the education of kids. However, this edition of EU Code Week had served as a catalyst to try out different plugged and unplugged activities that made pupils engaged and excited. “The pupils were very enthusiastic and wanted to keep going,” said a very proud teacher, when speaking about her kids’ accomplishments.  

Teacher Franka van Deursen from The Netherlands, had the opportunity to show the accomplishment not only of her pupils, but of an entire community. More than 300 classes danced the Code Week  dance (To Code Week’s anthem the Ode to Code), where adults had as much fun as children did. “Dancing is a step-by-step activity, and that is exactly what coding is. It’s a good way to enter into the coding world and develop your skills.” She explained that Brainport is a high-tech environment, and it is important for the kids to understand they can be creators, not just consumers of technology and its sub-products.  

The winners of the EU Code Week 2021 Hackathon, Strassium, joined from Slovenia to deliver a clear message: Coding is very creative, and it would be good for kids to start early because it brings a lot of positive things. Plus, starting from the game perspective can make it fun, and then can turn into bigger projects as they get older. 

Now, looking into the future, what do you want to see, experience, and create in EU Code Week 2022? As this initiative reaches its first decade, the hope is to gather many ideas from our community and make them possible for all around the globe.