According to a news release, the Teachers Lead Tech platform’s international expansion is part of the company’s goal of reaching 20 million children worldwide in the coming years. To date it has been used by more than 50 percent of teachers in grades K-8 in Lithuania, impacting more than 110,000 students.
Teachers Lead Tech’s expansion announcement coincided with its winning a World Summit Award in the “learning and education” category, beating out other companies from across the world that showcased digital solutions for the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. Judges assessed winners based on work performed in 2022, and the winners were announced June 5 at the summit event in Mexico.
“It is an immensely gratifying experience to develop technological and educational solutions that empower teachers in their classrooms and enable children to discover the joy of creating with technology,” Monika Katkute, founder and CEO of Teachers Lead Tech, said in a public statement. “Our entire team dedicates this award to all teachers who, through their daily work, not only create magic in their classrooms with computer science but also impart one of the most essential skills in today’s world. We are grateful to the WSA for acknowledging our efforts and for providing a platform that celebrates digital innovations that make a positive impact on society.”
According to its website, Teachers Lead Tech breaks down its pedagogical approach as “understand, practice, and create,” giving students and teachers a “soft start” in computer science in an effort not to overwhelm anyone in the learning process. The company began offering pilot programs with U.S. schools in April.
In a video on the website, Ruta Kruliauskaite, curriculum designer with Teachers Lead Tech, demonstrates how the platform explains the concept of “motion” in the coding language Scratch, a block-based visual programming language for children. After the concept is introduced (step 1: “understand”), the student proceeds to a guided exercise in which they can re-create the animation of an apple moving around a landscape by selecting puzzle-shaped pieces and putting them together in the correct order (“practice”). In the “create” step, students apply mathematical concepts like geometry to draw the shapes they saw in the landscape image that they animated in the previous step, helping them to better understand the foundations of Scratch coding.
“Students experience our pedagogical approach through creating the project themselves,” Kruliauskaite says in the video.
