Kęstutis has grown in little town, being curious and always tried to break stuff and learn how things work. He was always interested in technologies, but IT lessons at school was not the best quality, so additional efforts was needed to keep up to date. He early decided to study CS, and after finishing Masters, working for several companies, he turned out back to education, become teacher-volunteer at Microcomputers for Kids Foundation and fulfilled his long-time dream to teach 1024 students. Viltautė is strongly interested in social projects, education and volunteering. After 5 years of active volunteering in many different organisations, she found herself as a successful 500 volunteers manager at Architecture Found. Architecture was her passion for few years, but technologies world was always next to her as a main interest. Microcomputers for Kids foundation let her fulfil a dream to combine all her knowledge from IT projects management with social projects and volunteering experience.
Project
Microcomputers for Kids Foundation has a goal to change ICT education in Lithuania, fill in inequality between regions and bring interesting lessons to everybody. Project evolved from initial idea to bring every 5th grader a programmable microcomputer and teach them coding basics in a fun way. We now focus on teacher training, give them tools, learning material, full support, and a little push to try out new things, implement them in formal lessons with their kids and share experiences.
Impact story
It all began with pilot phase, 4 schools were chosen to try out micro:bit as a tool to be used for coding lessons. In first school year we did a fundraiser, tool delivery, volunteer visits and teacher training. Result was 20.000 delivered micro:bits - over 80% of our initial goal. Together with 5th graders we had 10.000! hours of learning CS. Second year we choose 40 motivated schools to take part in "Microcomputers Rally". We expanded to 5-8 grades, also having another discipline teacher, we outgrown IT lessons to mathematics, physics, languages, art. Our teachers had a task to create integrated lesson plan. Theses lessons in workbook format will be handed out to every school next year.
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