Students visited the Friedensreich Hundertwasser School in Neukirchen-Vluyn and presented exciting digital content to the Year 4 pupils in a way that was suitable for children. This interdisciplinary project is aimed at schools in the local area, with the aim of introducing children in Years 4 and 5 to topics in computer science.
How does the internet work? What is a server or a computer virus? What can you do about online bullying? How do you create a secure password? How does the Wi-Fi network at home work? How do you spot online scams? These are all questions that children are thinking about these days. However, schools often fail to provide adequate answers to these questions.
To address this, students on the Psychology programme (Industrial and Organisational Psychology) as well as those on the Media Informatics and Administrative Informatics –
E-Government programmes are developing, as part of an interdisciplinary student project led by Professor Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Greveler, Professor of Applied Computer Science, specialising in IT security and the technical fundamentals of computer science. They are developing needs-based materials on computer science topics for children in Years 4 and 5. Local schools were contacted about this. The response was overwhelming.
During the 2019/2020 winter term, the students will visit several primary and secondary schools and personally deliver suitable lessons in the relevant classes. In a later phase of the project, classes or interested groups from the schools will be offered the opportunity to visit the university itself to receive age-appropriate teaching on computer science topics.
The project has now got under way with a visit by the students to the Friedensreich-Hundertwasser School in Neukirchen-Vluyn. During this visit, three 90-minute sessions were taught in different classes. It became apparent that most pupils already have some experience of the internet and digital communication. Many of them own a mobile phone, play online games and already communicate via messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook. However, they were largely unaware of how the technology actually works and how to protect themselves from unwanted contact attempts, particularly from strangers. This is precisely where the students’ teaching focuses.
“The pupils benefit from the commitment of the students, who want to pass on their IT knowledge to very young people. When the children later move on to further education and university, they are expected to be well versed in the digital world. It is best to start teaching digital topics as early as primary school,” says Greveler.
Behind this initiative lies the cabinet decision by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia on 19 November 2019 to introduce computer science as a subject in primary and secondary schools from the 2021/22 academic year onwards. At present, however, there is a shortage of computer science teachers and suitable further training for primary school teachers. The aim of the students’ visits to schools and the provision of free teaching materials is to improve the current unsatisfactory state of pupils’ basic digital literacy in the context of a digitalised society.
