Teaching digital skills to future teachers: a distance workshop experience

In the school year 2020–2021, the Covid-19 pandemic imposed distance learning (in Italian, the DAD acronym is used). Therefore, the Degree Course in Primary Education Sciences of the University of Perugia has proposed an innovative programme for the training of future teachers by developing a distance learning laboratory focusing coding and computational thinking applied to teaching in kindergarten and primary school. During the educational technologies laboratory, held by Prof. Floriana Falcinelli, the students experimented coding both without computer (unplugged) and using the Scratch software. The programmed animations and video games were in direct connection with the Lifelong Kindergarten of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where Scratch was created. The highly innovative aspects concerned both the proposed contents and the dimension of interaction and collaboration as entirely developed in online environments.