DiCoTe: Increasing professional Digital Competence in ECTE with focus on enriching and supporting children’s play with coding toys

DiCoTe stands for "Increasing professional Digital Competence in ECTE with focus on enriching and supporting children's play with coding toys." The project is conducted by kindergarten researchers from FILIORUM and the Department of Early Childhood Education, and will contribute to building research expertise that meets important societal challenges.

The resources developed in the project will help to enrich and support children's play with technology in kindergarten. The focus will be on play with coding toys that children aged 3-5 years, in cooperation, can program by giving logical messages to a robot via direct interaction with the toy, without the use of a screen.

The resources will be developed in a partnership between Early Childhood Education Teacher Training educators, students in the Early Childhood Education Teacher program, kindergarten teachers, kindergarten owners and researchers. A wide range of methods will be used, such as surveys, focus group interviews, discourse analysis, systematic reviews and observations.

Why work with technology in the kindergarten?

There is an urgent need to raise professional digital competence in Early Childhood Education Teacher Training. Technology is an important part of children's learning and play today, and digital practice is highlighted as an important focus area in the Framework Plan for Kindergartens. It's also been high on the government's agenda for the last decade. Despite these efforts, it has been reported that staff in Norwegian kindergartens lack the necessary skills to facilitate the use of digital tools that support children's play and learning.

Collaboration across institutions

Nine kindergartens and twelve kindergarten teachers from three municipalities take part in the partnership with the research team. Initially, the resources will be piloted in the Early Childhood Education Teacher Training programs at the University of Stavanger and Queen Maud's University College in Trondheim, with the aim of establishing a national standard to increase Norwegian kindergarten teachers' professional digital competence

Later, the resources will be available to all kindergarten teacher training institutions in Norway through a secure server. The Norwegian Centre for Mathematics Education and Vitenfabrikken will also contribute to communicating the project's results to a wider and non-specialist audience.