Student project led by Prashant Pandey

Hilary round 2015 (offered funding but did not take it up)

For more information, please contact innovation@it.ox.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

Decoding Programming is an initiative to improve I.T. literacy across state schools in Oxford, across the UK and also globally in the longer term. Learning how to solve problems through programming is a very important skill, and our team wants to inspire school students to learn programming in an exciting and innovative manner. We will achieve this by developing a web application that will contain a series of lessons, activities and examples which will teach some fundamental concepts in programming. Once this application is developed, our team of volunteer tutors will go into schools to give these lessons to classes of students, and help them work through problems on the web application that they can access through their computers. Most importantly, with the presence of our volunteers in classrooms, it will be possible to inspire school students, especially girls, to think about technical subjects (the STEM subjects) as well as non-technical subjects through the perspective of information technology. We want to challenge the traditional perception of computer science and I.T. and reinforce its creative aspect, and how it can be used to solve problems in several industries and career paths.

With this approach, we hope to better equip future generations of students to pursue the study of programming and computer science throughout their academic and working careers. Not only will this make them more employable, but ensure that more problems in the future (for example, problems in development and sustainability) are being solved in an innovative and logical manner.