The European Commission estimates that more than 900,000 high tech jobs will go unfilled in 2020. We want to do something about that. As part of our on-going efforts to encourage more school students to learn about computing, and to ensure that all of them have an opportunity to get the right skills, we participated in the EC initiative Europe Code Week 2015 which took place Oct 10-18. To kick things off we supported the ‘EU Dojo’ event at the European Parliament, where students introduced coding to Members of European Parliament. We also ran office events in Brussels and Amsterdam and sent Googlers out to visit students in Ireland and Greece. Furthermore, we provided small grants and resources to organizations running computer science outreach events: from Belgium to Bulgaria, France to Finland, and Spain to Slovakia. In Ljubljana we supported the University of Ljubljana’s “Programming for Fun” series of events, which featured opportunities for over 200 students of all ages. School kids receive a certificate after participating in a workshop with Hackidemia Bulgaria
In Bulgaria, the Vratsa Software Development Community ran two days of workshops to inspire youth about the potentials of a career in technology. Other cool initiatives included coding workshops for 200 students during Coders’ Picnic by Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska, the ‘KAS.juniorEXPERTS’ initiative in Germany, educational robotics workshops in Greece and the CodeSevilla event by Programamos. You can read more about the grantees here. In all, we supported over 60 organizations in 24 countries to reach almost 20,000 students in just one week.
Ultimately, during Europe Code Week 2015 over 7000 events took place inspiring hundreds of thousands of students - an amazing effort! Let’s keep the momentum going. See Code Week’s events page to see all the different activities still happening, and learn more about Google’s effort in computer science education at g.co/csedu.
Posted by Marielena Ivory, Pre-university Education Specialist, Europe
