Developing the Creativity of Older Adults through Coding Erasmus Project

Project Title

Developing the Creativity of Older Adults through Coding

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Creativity

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills

Project Summary

One of the main objectives of the Digital Skills and Jobs Coalition, as defined by the European Union, is to ensure that everyone has the right digital skills (including programming and coding) to thrive in society and on the labour market, where such tools are fundamental for professional, personal and social tasks. Right now, more than 90% of professional occupations require digital competencies. However, this demand is not aligned with the existing offer – there is a major shortage of qualified staff (about 825,000 ICT job vacancies expected this year). This gap is not specific to a particular country; rather, it is evident at a European level calling for interventions to address it towards enhancing sustainable economic growth through human capital, enhancing European competitiveness, reducing unemployment, and promoting social cohesion. In this scenario, there is a need to improve the citizens’ skills, especially older adults’ competencies, since their digital exclusion prevents them from being fully integrated into the Knowledge and Information Society. This exclusion became even more prominent in the context of the current COVID-19 crisis, which exposed some groups’ difficulty in adapting to the new societal challenges.

Programming and coding skills allow us to create all types of applications for all digital devices, from casual games to complex atmospheric simulations, from desktop computers to smartphones. Coding is today’s literacy, improving skills like problem-solving, teamwork, and analytical thinking and enhancing creativity, teaching people to cooperate across physical and geographical boundaries and to communicate in a universal language (DG Connect, 2020). For adults, studies have demonstrated a positive transfer of coding and programming skills to situations that required creative thinking, mathematical skills, and metacognition, followed by spatial skills and reasoning. This has enormous advantages in a world where adults have to master financial abilities, personal and social management skills, etc. Furthermore, for older adults, it is a way to keep the mind active and maintain cognitive skills, namely attention, working memory, and language processing.

In this way, SILVERCODERS (Developing the Creativity of Older Adults through Coding) intends to develop the digital and creative abilities of trainers and adult learners by engaging institutions and organisations in formal, informal, and non-formal education for adults with companies from the creative sector. Doing so intends to provide adults with the necessary tools and competencies to develop creative and innovative solutions to face new risks and challenges, both in personal, educational and professional contexts. This can be important in all sectors of activity, but even more, in the creative and cultural sectors, which could benefit from becoming more digital and modern because this renovation would contribute to making the sector (one of the most hardest-hit ones) more adaptable, resilient, and able to survive and prosper in the current situation and possible future challenges as well.

By contributing to the digital literacy of 55+ adults, by equipping them with programming and coding abilities, the project will reinforce their cognitive status and will allow them to acquire or improve their employability skills and adapt them to the current societal challenges. The project will produce the following outputs:
1. A methodological learning framework (IO1) for building coding skills among 55+ adults which will encourage learners to develop their digital and creative abilities based on a “low entry high ceiling approach” that has low knowledge requirements in the beginning and gradually propose more complex challenges. Learners will be exposed to “half baked” scenarios and encouraged to finish partially completed solutions by building blocks of software;
2. A proof-of-concept pilot test (IO2) for building coding skills among 55+ adults;
3. Instructional support content (IO3) in the form of best practice videos, video-lectures and user guides that will facilitate the integration of the proposed methodologies into existing adult training organizations. The project will adopt the Open Badge framework to recognize the acquired skills and competencies of the trainers and the adults.

The project will also constitute a pool of experts/trainers with specific competencies and expertise to work as a support community. The project expects to reach directly, in the training stages, about 100 trainers and 350 adults. The multiplier events will be the opportunity to reach at least another 210 stakeholders. through other dissemination actions, the project expects to reach another 3500 adults, setting up conditions for successful replication and future expansion.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 221984 Eur

Project Coordinator

STIFTELSEN KURSVERKSAMHETEN VID U-AUNIVERSITET & Country: SE

Project Partners

• MEDIA CREATIVA 2020, S.L.
• Institutul Roman de Educatie a Adultilor
• PANEPISTIMIO THESSALIAS
• VIRTUAL CAMPUS LDA
• ANZIANI E NON SOLO SOCIETA COOPERATIVA SOCIALE