Education And Outreach Activities In Ireland: An Experience Report

The Lero Education and Outreach (E&O) programme discussed in this paper focuses on our goal to increase the interest and knowledge of high school students in computing and software engineering and encourage a greater uptake of computing and software engineering at university. While many high school outreach programmes operate in countries that offer Computer Science (CS) education for all high school students or at least offer a pre-university level course, this is not the case in Ireland. In terms of a national approach to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in schools, 53% of Irish high schools are involved in the European Computing Driving License (ECDL) programme, but the focus of this programme is on computer literacy rather than computer science.The outreach programme, which we have been running for four years, focusing on computational concepts and computational thinking, consists of four parts: teaching materials/curriculum, teacher training, a competition and summer computing camps. Teaching materials/curriculum include a 45 hour course designed for high school students. Teacher training is concerned with training primary and high school teachers. The competition is an annual Scratch competition run for primary and high school students. The summer computing camps are run in our university for a number of weeks during the summer period. Software engineering concepts are introduced in all four parts of the programme during the software project phases. Our outreach efforts primarily use the Scratch tool that was developed at the MIT Media Lab.We describe each outreach effort in detail and outline our experiences based on a mixture of survey results, instructor observation and participant feedback. We will conclude by describing how the E&O programme has led to Lero being commissioned by the Department of Education to write a computing course for high school students that will be part of the official curriculum.