Mikhail Shelkov’s Empathy Foundation helped teach 80 school children the basics of programming

Over the course of 12 sessions, the young programmers were able to animate characters and create their own games. Now they want to present these results at the Scientific and Practical Conference in Salda in 2022.

The immersion of Salda’s school teachers in IT, like all schools in the country, began with the switch to distance learning during the pandemic. But before they could really start programming, teachers themselves needed to learn the basics of IT. In 2021, experts from Mikhail Shelkov’s foundation held the first professional development course on “Digital Tools in the Work of a Teacher”, thanks to which the first group of nearly 200 teachers in Verkhnyaya and Nizhnyaya Salda not only mastered the necessary programs, but also easily transitioned from the usual offline method to the interactive format of online lesson delivery.

Empathy Foundation creator Mikhail Shelkov noted:

“The mass transition of teachers to online was a step into the unknown. It is like the first time a person goes into outer space: it is very exciting, but it is also absolutely unclear what to do and how to do it. However, it was this forced distance teaching that gave us the most valuable thing – information about what training programs are needed so that any teacher can come to understand them and find something useful for their lessons. Now we are working in this direction not only with adults, but also with children. At the beginning of the school year, 80 school children and 8 teachers decided to create their first computer animated stories, and we, of course, gladly supported them.”

The idea and materials were provided to the teachers by ROBBO, and Mikhail Shelkov’s Empathy Foundation financed the teachers’ extracurricular work. Work with young people occupies an important place in Empathy’s activities. In January this year, Mikhail Shelkov’s foundation allocated funds to the Children’s Rehabilitation Center of N. Salda to equip places for a new group of children. A month earlier, it had sent Santa Clauses to visit the children with gifts. Another initiative to be held at the end of last year, was the final of the engineering accelerator for teenagers of Verkhnyaya and Nizhnyaya Salda, Masterskaya: Salda 2.0, organized by the foundation together with the Higher Technical School (Tula). Fifty-four school children worked on projects to improve their towns together with mentors and teachers. Starting this year, the 4 winning teams, with the most unusual solutions, will be able to put their projects into practice and completely transform their cities.

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