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On Wednesday, January 20^th and Thursday, January 21^st 2022, the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics organised the kick-off meeting of the Erasmus+ KA220-SCH - project titled OOP4FUN - Object Oriented Programming for Fun. Our institution is the project coordinator.

The 32-month project is funded under the Erasmus + program “Cooperation partnerships in school education” of the European Commission in the total amount of 283.228,00€.
The main project idea is to support secondary schools’ teachers of programming courses in their mission of IT education, independently if their students will be the IT experts with HEI education in the future or experts in other fields. Therefore the goals of this project are to create new or upgraded curricula for IT courses and innovative teaching method that includes implementation of agile methods, communication skills, and teamwork, to teach the high school educators how to implement a new curriculum through educational workshops and other educational activities and to develop teaching and learning object oriented programming through game development as a way of motivating both male and female students to work in a team project and increase their interest in object oriented programming and STEM in general.

Although the first meeting had to be held online, the partners managed to achieve the goal of getting to know the partners teams involved and to make the initial project overview and coordination of the project management activities and first project result which will enable them to explore, teach and implement the changes described as project objectives.

In addition to the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, the partners of this project include the leading European universities in the field of informatics/computer science and high schools are: the Faculty of Organisation and Informatics the University of Zagreb, the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics the University of Pardubice, the Faculty of Organisational Sciences University of Beograd, Srednja škola Ivanec, Gymnazium Pardubice, Obchodna akademia Považská Bystrica, the University of Applied Sciences HTW Dresden, Gimnazija Ivanjica and Gymnasium Dresden-Plauen.

During the project, the partners will jointly work on 5 main project results and will start by creating an analysis of the current state & identification of gaps in (teaching) programming in high schools and Universities, coordinated by Srednja škola Ivanec.
The expected impact of this project can be seen through target groups (secondary school teachers, high school students), participants and industry, use of modern methods of agile software development and technologies in pedagogical practice following the principles of Education 4.0. This way of teaching will provide students with soft skills to be able to utilize in the fields not related to STEM as well (critical thinking, teamwork, communication, work with information sources, etc.). An increase in motivation of students naturally leads to the raise of their knowledge which will give students a good base for further study in universities.