Google stumps up £120k to boost UK teacher coding skills
Google has announced it is backing an initiative to train British primary school teachers in computer coding to the tune of £120k.
Code Club Pro kicks off this April with the aim of training more than 20,000 teachers by 2016, helping them to teach children as young as five basic coding skills. The original Code Club first launched in 2012 and has now grown to 2,000 after-school clubs around the UK.
Google has long been a benefactor to UK computer science education, distributing 15,000 Raspberry Pi computers to British schools and lending financial support to Code Club partner, Computing at School.
Speaking to the guardian Google’s UK engineering director Mike Warriner said: “A key focus for us, now that we’ve got computer science on the curriculum for this September, is how we make sure that is a reality, and that teachers and schools are prepared enough to teach it and inspire the children to get involved,“
“Code Club are one of the key people we’ve been working with to help build up enough teachers to be able to teach the courses. It starts with training a small number of teachers to be, in effect, the teachers of other teachers, and ultimately scaling that out to every primary and secondary school teacher across the country.“
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/07/google-code-club-pro-teachers