The URJC prepares schoolchildren from Fuenlabrada for the jobs of the future

The City Council and the Rey Juan Carlos University have just launched the second part of the computational thinking project 'figure it out' for boys and girls, primary school students up to 4th ESO.

Raul Garcia Hemonnet

Creating their own animations and video games or identifying the hoaxes that fill the network, with a scientific method, are some of the activities that Fuenlabrada schoolchildren will be able to carry out in the workshops organized by the City Council and the URJC.

For Adrián Bacelo, Assistant Professor in the area of Applied Mathematics at the URJC and coordinator of the workshops on behalf of the University, the objective of these activities “is to give children and young people scientific tools to use and learn about technology. Half of the jobs that will be in 50 years do not exist yet, and it is important that they become familiar with the programming and the applications”.

With this objective, programs have been set up for all ages: for children aged 5 and 6, they work with the robot-game 'Cubetto', with which they learn to program in a basic way and become familiar with structured thinking and problem solving.

Those who are somewhat older (3rd year of primary school to 4th year of ESO) will be able to work with the 'Scratch' program. With it they will be able to make their first video games and applications developing computational and decisive thinking, in a playful way.

Along these same lines, the 'pills' based on Google Blockly are proposed, which allow "providing basic tools when it comes to programs, so that boys and girls understand why things are done in a certain way", Bacelo pointed out.

Not everything is programming

In addition to the workshops directly related to technology, the 'Ingéniate' initiative proposes, in collaboration with the 'Escuelas Comciencia' project of the CiberImaginario group of the Fuenlabrada Campus, an activity to identify hoaxes on the network through a scientific method.

Finally, the 'Matedivertidas' workshop aims to “end the stereotypes that mathematics is boring”, explains Adrián Bacelo. In a playful way, calculation and the hierarchy of operations are worked on, through games or magic tricks.

All these activities were successful in their first phase. “Both the students and the families have shown great satisfaction and have told us that they want to continue and that the workshops be expanded”, Bacelo pointed out.