<< Background >>We introduce a few citations from the relevant documents of the European Union related to its digital strategy:The last years and the covid-19 pandemic highlighted the importance for European society. Digital technologies bring with them new ways to learn, entertain, work, explore and fulfill ambitions. However, there are still many challenges associated with the move to a digital world that need to be addressed. Over the next decade - the digital decade - the EU’s vision is for a digital world that empowers people and businesses, and that is shaped around a human-centred, sustainable and more prosperous approach. The digital compass sets out objectives to achieve the EU’s vision for the digital future. It uses the four points of the compass to identify the main goals to reach over the next decade. One of these four points is a digitally skilled population and highly skilled digital professionals. (Shaping Europe’s digital future - https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-compass).Human capital in ICT is a driving force for digital and digital-enabled innovations and may be considered as crucial for the competitiveness of modern-day economies. Although this segment of the labour market is quite small in absolute terms, ICT employment was relatively resistant to the cyclical nature of economic events during the most recent decade for which data are available.In its New Skills Agenda for Europe, the Commission asked all Member States to develop national digital skills strategies by mid-2017 and to set up national coalitions to support their implementation. It aims to enhance the digital skills of (1) citizens – developing digital skills to enable all citizens to be active in our digital society (digitally fluent citizens); (2) the labour force – developing digital skills for the digital economy, e.g. upskilling and reskilling workers and job-seekers; actions on career advice and guidance; (3) ICT professionals – developing high-level digital skills for ICT professionals in all industry sectors, and (4) education providers – transforming the teaching and learning of digital skills in a lifelong learning perspective, including the training of teachers.The demand for high-tech skills is on a solid growth track. The number of IT practitioners was predicted to grow from 8 million in 2015 to almost 8.7 million in 2020 in the EU28. The estimate from January 2017 of the gap between demand and supply is 500,000 in 2020. This gap comes in part from a number of IT educated professionals coming out of Higher Education (HE) and Vocational Training (VET). Under the main scenario, 240,000 graduates from IT related HE programmes and VET schemes keep entering the labour market per year, plus also more than 100,000 new IT practitioners without such a formal degree (i.e., “lateral entries”). (http://eskills-scale.eu/news/single-view/the-high-tech-skills-gap-in-europe-will-reach-500000-in-2025-with-a-strong-polarisation-of-skills-needed.html)The facts introduced above clearly describe the need for ICT specialists in the EU. In our project, we would like to address this need.We would like to address this need by developing a new way of teaching programming. Namely, object oriented programming. “The role of programming in computer science is similar to that of practical work in other sciences – it provides motivation and a context within which ideas are brought to life.”Besides the motivation derived from the different sources of the EU, we can mention the other needs that shall be covered with our project proposal:We can see a decreasing number of students interested in STEM study programmes at high schools in the last years. We need to motivate the students. We need to show them that STEM and especially programming is not difficult to study.The only persons that can high school students convince about this fact are their own teachers of STEM and programming courses.<< Objectives >>Our project is focused on high school teachers - our primary target group. Based on interviews with the university teachers from project organisations, there is a gap in understanding basic programming principles, especially in the case of object oriented programming (OOP). It is very important that high school teacher understand what is OOP about. Unfortunately, we know cases when the teacher does not understand the programming principles correctly. This has an influence on students’ education and student perception of programming. We conducted a survey among students of project organisations (high schools). The survey results show that the students often think that STEM subjects and programming are too difficult and they are not interested in them. Unfortunately, it is the result of incorrect teaching by the high school teacher. We would like to avoid these cases with our project.We will prepare an overview of current methods, methodologies, concepts in programming for high school teachers. We will prepare the syllabus and guides (textbooks + online content). We will prepare educational materials for future teachers when necessary.Team of scientists and experts from the participating universities has a wide range of expertise, scientific and professional interests and achievements. Thus, the main and unique mission of this international team could be to empower the curriculum and results of the projects aimed for students and the teachers learning and teaching OOP by means of game development with knowledge and skills related to development process and collaboration in real and virtual environments. The project results with our expertise could be empowered by the following:* Agile methods and tools in development - The team of students developing a simple game and learning object-oriented programming could be organized in a scrum team, and could use the tools for collaboration in such an agile team. In this way, students would have fun working on the project as well as acquire an additional skill very valuable for future employment.* Communication (tools) for teams - In addition to development (i.e. hard) skills in object-oriented programming and game development, the real-life teams struggle with the lack of soft skills related to communication. With the help of state-of-the art theory and adequate tools, the teams of students and teachers would be empowered with soft skills and knowledge on use of tools necessary for successful collaboration and communication in real and virtual environments.* Innovation in teaching methods - The expected resulting framework of learning object-oriented programming through game development, enriched with introduction of agile and collaborative practices in the development process would be based and built upon several different very popular teaching methods and approaches such as project-based learning, agile learning, collaborative/peer learning, active learning, learning by doing, problem-based learning and game-based learning.<< Implementation >>Expected project activities:* four transnational project meetings (Zilina, Ivanec, Pardubice, Ivanjica)* one educational activity for teachers from high schools - learning, teaching and training activity (Dresden)* five multiplier events (Zilina, Zagreb, Pardubice, Belgrade, Dresden)* five project results<< Results >>Our project consortium defined five project results and related outcomes:PR1 - Analysis of current state & identification of gaps in (teaching) programmingPR2 - Learning design with new core idea of (teaching) programmingPR3- Developing of new curriculum for (teaching) programmingPR4 - Materials for teachers - transfer of experience for current and future teachersPR5 - Proposal of new curriculum for accreditation bodies in the secondary levelThese project results will enable deeply understant current situation of curricula for programming courses of high schools in five European countries - Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Serbia and Slovakia. University teachers from the same countries will prepare an analysis of gaps in teaching programming in their countries. Based on this, new and innovative learning design for teaching programming will be defined in cooperation with high school teachers. Parallelly, the university teachers from three participating organisations (the University of Zilina, the University of Zagreb, the University of Belgrade) will create a new core idea of teaching programming based on their own national educational concepts. The new core idea of teaching programming will be the important starting point for developing of new curriculum for teaching programming. The selected learning design will be implemented as well. Based on the common agreement of the partner organisations and associated partners, the development of a new generation of educational materials for high school teachers should be started. These materials will include modern textbooks and supporting material (worksheets, examples, methodology). All educational materials will be published on the e-learning portal with free access that will be enabled after registration. The last very important activity will be cooperation on proposals of new curricula for teaching programming to be able to accredite and recognise them in countries of the project partners.