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The European Code Week: an initiative which brings coding and digital literacy to everybody

"We need to speed up the upgrading of digital skills, including coding. If you want to be successful at your job, in your business and in the production sector you need to have a portfolio of digital skills. EU Code Week provides an opportunity to learn a digital skill that is essential on the job market".

- Günther H.Oettinger, Commissioner responsible for Digital Economy and Society

The European Code Week brings together children, teenagers, adults, parents, teachers, entrepreneurs and policymakers in events and classrooms across Europe to learn how to create using code. The aims of these initiatives are to show how people can bring ideas to life with code, to make programming more visible, to demystify these skills and to bring motivated people together to learn.

The EU Code Week is a grass-root movement run by volunteers who promote coding in their countries as Code Week Ambassadors. The initiative was launched in 2013 by the Young Advisors for the Digital Agenda for Europe. In 2014 more than 150,000 people participated in 4,200 coding events in 36 countries in Europe and beyond.

As part of its strategy for a Digital Single Market, the European Commission supports EU Code Week and other independent initiatives which aim to boost digital skills, including programming, for different target groups. Coding empowers you to do many things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do such as; hand-crafting your own websites, becoming a career coder or even starting a technology business. Most importantly, you'll be able to understand the technology shaping your world. Learning coding has many benefits - whether you're looking for a career in the industry, starting a new hobby or just wanting to understand technology. 

In 2015, 46 countries took part in the EU Code Week - all EU member states together with Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Albania, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey. Events took place in Australia, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, South Korea, Moldova, Morocco, Taiwan, Tunisia, Ukraine and the United States. In all, there were 83 code week Ambassadors who took part in 7,600 coding events and reached over 570,000 people. From them, well over 526,000 people were participants from the EU. 88,763 students also learnt to code in Africa - through the Africa Code Week initiative, a spin-off of EU Code Week, led by a multi-stakeholder partnership.  In fact a new record for the EU Code Week was reached in 2015 with more than half a million people taking part.

EU Code Week aims at celebrating the art of creating with code, motivating people to start learning to code, as well as connecting individuals, groups, organizations and companies who are willing to help more people experience the joy and relevance of coding.

Malta's participation in the 2016 EU Code - Week

In 2016 EU Code Week will take place between 15 and 23 October, although "every week is Code Week"!  This year eSkills Malta Foundation will be collaborating with both MCAST and the Faculty of ICT - University of Malta by organising a series of sessions on various coding subjects. Sessions range from 'A walkthrough in developing a dynamic website with PHP' to one of the most popular being 'Building your first mobile app in 2 hours'. There will be a series of sessions during the EU Code week in October. These sessions are aimed for all age groups (with some knowledge of computing required) and are free of charge.

 To attend for any one of these sessions please register at http://eskills.org.mt/codeweek16