EU Code Week is back for its ninth edition (October 9-24), with the hackathon final taking place on October 14, 2021. Teams from Greece, Latvia, Ireland, Italy, Romania and Slovenia have been competing in national hackathons and trying to find solutions for local challenges offering new activities such as ready-made classroom challenges.

EU Code Week offers a training Bootcamp for teachers, the final in a series of hackathons and thousands of activities organised around the world by teachers and coding enthusiasts. This year EU Code Week rolls out the biggest variety of trainings, resources, materials and engagement opportunities in its history.

Digital technologies

EU Code Week contributes to the EU’s Digital decade targets, by letting young people take first steps in programming and related digital technologies paving the way for them to become passionate about digital technologies and for some to take the step to adopt it as their future profession.

Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, said: "Being able to understand code and to write it in a meaningful sequence, is truly the superpower of the 21st century. Those who participate in the EU Code Week have a wonderful opportunity to acquire and improve their coding skills or teach others how to code."

The EU Code Week online Bootcamp, which is open until 18 October 2021 provides teachers of all subjects from pre-primary to secondary with resources, concrete lesson plans and tools on how to inspire students to learn to code. Participants will also discover ideas and tips on how to bring coding and computational thinking to the classroom.

Designed as a 3-course module, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is suitable for all levels of coding expertise, starting from the level of a complete beginner. Participants will meet like-minded colleagues to learn together and co-create teaching materials. In addition to the thousands of online participants, 37 local study groups led by leading teachers of the Code Week community will follow the course.

A brand new feature of this year’s Code Week are the EU Code Week Challenges, as 18 challenges offer a great way to participate in Code Week and to introduce coding to the classroom.  Those who share their journey through the challenges on social media during EU Code Week will have the chance to win original Code Week prizes.

EU Code Week  officially kicked off on 7 October with renowned speakers, video messages from vice-presidents Vestager, Jourová and Schinas as well as Commissioners Breton, Gabriel and Schmit and other highlights. Broadcasted live from Brussels, coding enthusiasts could join a virtual evening of coding and learn about everything that EU Code Week has to offer. The event was live-streamed on the EU Code Week Facebook page and YouTube channel.

Hackathon final

The EU Code Week hackathon final takes place on October 14, 2021, at 5pm CET. Teams from Greece, Latvia, Ireland, Italy, Romania and Slovenia have been competing in national hackathons and trying to find solutions for local challenges. Now, the winning teams of each country will pitch their work in the big final. The event will be live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube. Member of the European Parliament Monika Hohlmeier will open the event.

During EU Code Week, tens of thousands of activities will be organised all over the world allowing participants to discover robotics, AI, game and app design among others. The scoreboard indicates which country organises most coding activities per population: Malta currently in first place, followed by Austria and Poland.

In the Code Week 4 All Challenge activity organisers can invite others from their network to also organise activities and link them to theirs. When the activity organisers achieve to link activities from 10 different organisers or from 3 different countries to their activity, they will obtain a Certificate of Excellence. For the promotion of activities, toolkits can be found on the website.

Additionally, EU Code Week offers a selection of other great resources to learn and to teach coding. Created by the EU Code Week team, Coding@Home, a collection of short-videos, puzzles and games to do at home, simulate computational thinking to cultivate coding skills without previous knowledge or electronic devices – perfect also for the classroom.