Brussels, 30/07/2014 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 29 July, the European Commission announced that the second EU Code Week will take place from 11 to 17 October 2014 in order to make IT programming more visible, demystify the underlying skills and bring together people wishing to learn how to programme. The aim is to encourage thousands of children, parents, teachers, decision-makers and entrepreneurs to take part in events and meet in classrooms to learn basic programming and related skills. The Commission explains: “Each and every interaction between human beings and computers is governed by code. Programming everywhere and fundamental to understanding a hyper-connected world (…). Basic coding skills will also be needed for many jobs in the near future”.
The event has been supported by programming and education movements CoderDojo and Rails Girls, along with big information technology companies such as Rovio, Microsoft, Telefonica, Liberty Global, Google and Facebook. They all aim to allow millions of children to learn programming by organising introductory sessions and training courses and helping to train teachers. In each participating country, one or more ambassadors for EU Code Week have been designated as the event's main contact point, who will talk about the event and link up local programming communities and interested parties. Events will be organised at local level and published by the organiser on a map on the EU Code Week website. For people desiring further information, the Commission has published an overview of events from August onwards in a number of different member states “in order to make 2014 the summer you learn how to code”: http://events.codeweek.eu/ambassadors/ (IL)