Indispensable for children in the 21st century; working on digital literacy in a fun and accessible way.

In the American state of North Carolina, a twelve-year-old boy managed to earn his high school diploma and graduate in the same week. He managed to cram both school periods into one year.

Mike Wimmer tells the American news channel CNN that he has a great interest in robotics and programming. When he was one and a half years old, the now-graduated teenager received his first iPad and there was immediately great interest in how such a device works.

Programming, coding, it’s not just for Mike Wimmer. He has taught himself a lot through online videos. And that’s what social enterprise Bomberbot* also offers. After all, it must be fun to learn. Bomberbot has developed a platform for primary and secondary school students to develop their digital skills. And in a very special way. The platform is set up in such a way that all the material used is fully integrated. In addition, teachers can monitor student progress in real-time and prepare lessons in less than 15 minutes. Teachers are already too busy with their day-to-day duties and this program allows teachers to teach without prior knowledge.

Digital skills are understood to mean: The whole of basic ICT skills, media literacy, information skills, and computational thinking. Digitally skilled students can distinguish fake news from reliable sources, no longer just consume technology, but also create it themselves. They can search for information online, make, program, repair, and analyze something themselves. They learn to work independently and creatively with the enormous wealth and challenges that the digital world has to offer.

Important? Yes! The guidelines from the SLO* have been drawn up in such a way that designated schools are expected to have run a pilot in the field of digital literacy before 2023. Digital Literacy is an indispensable element in 21st-century education. There is still too little attention for this in the current curriculum. If attention is paid to it, it is fragmented and not very coherent. Digital skills will have a more prominent place in the education of the future. Bomberbot has developed programs, created curriculum frameworks, set up learning pathways, and sought appropriate learning resources for each of the digital skills. The Bomberbot curriculum starts with preschool and continues through the second grade of high school.

The figure above presents 21st-century skills. They can be seen both separately and in conjunction, but always in combination with subject-specific knowledge and skills.

*For more information about Bomberbot, you can go to www.bomberbot.nl or email [email protected]

*SLO stands for Learning Plan Development Foundation in Dutch. It is a national center of expertise for developing curricula.