In pursuance of the recently unveiled National Education Policy 2020 by the Ministry of Education, GoI, in order to incorporate greater emphasis on computational thinking through innovative, engaging and enjoyable methods among the school students (std VI, VII and VIII), the Government of Goa, with the help of the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) and the Directorate of Education, has conceptualized the ‘Coding and Robotics Education inSchools’ Scheme.

For implementation of this scheme, the DTE has established the Project Management Unit(PMU) that would monitor the development of the syllabus, lesson plans, activities and audio visual content and the training of around 500 computer teachers from schools across Goa.

The PMU identified 34 Master Trainers (MTs) from which 9 faculty were chosen from Goa College of Engineering and conducted intensive training sessions from 7 th to 12 th June (online), 14 th to 19 th June (offline) and 1 st to 3 rd July (online) 2021 to prepare the MTs with knowledge of computing technologies like scratch, GIMP, code.world, Basics of Linux and Internet Security.

For the training of school teachers in these technologies, four laboratories from Goa Collegeof Engineering, were methodically equipped so that parallel offline training sessions could be conducted safely with regards to the social distancing norms. Each laboratory facilitated the training of 18 computer teachers.

From 8 th July to 11 th August 2021, eight, 3-day sessions were scheduled, in each laboratory enabling the training of around 500 school computer teachers across Goa with the help of 22 Master Trainers. The training sessions conducted were rigorous and concentrated on extending the knowledge of the teachers not only to be able to teach the school students the updated subject portion using ready lesson plans, but also to understand the need for incorporating this syllabus in the school curriculum. The focus of training every individual teacher was to impart the school students the necessary skillset of design and computational thinking.

The painstaking efforts by the department coordinators, core committee members, teaching and non-teaching staff and their whole hearted support helped in making this training schedule, a colossal success.