IOTA project: a second year full of new ambitions

The IOTA (Informatique Ouverte à Tous les Apprenants) project is an educational project for primary school students aged between 9 and 11 years old in France. It has been running in real-life situations since 2021. This 42 initiative, which is totally civic-minded and pro bono, aims to provide young generations with the necessary tools to thrive in a hyper-connected environment and to fight against the digital divide.

During the 2021/2022 school year, the IOTA project was tested on 60 classes of students aged 9–10. For 2022/2023, the project is moving up a gear: 300 classes will be recruited to test a new way of learning about digital and tech, inspired by the teaching methods of 42. The IOTA project is run in close collaboration with the French Ministry of Education and Youth.

The IOTA project is not only about digital skills. From a strictly human point of view, it is mostly about non-cognitive skills. For example, it is about pupils’ perseverance, their collaboration skills and their ability to communicate or to cooperate with each other. We have created a dedicated platform to test these skills: four tests will be offered to volunteer classes over the next six months. We will be able to measure the extent to which the IOTA project helps improve non-cognitive skills among pupils, as well as highlight other benefits that the IOTA project offers through its innovative pedagogy, in addition to digital skills.
Marc Perrin, IOTA Project Coordinator

Developments expected for 2023

As well as expanding to 300 classes of pupils aged 10 and 11, the 2022/2023 school year is an opportunity for the IOTA project to go even further in its objectives. First of all, it aims to restructure its entire organisation. 2021/2022 was a “proof of concept” year, and 2022/2023 is the year for “scaling up”, both in terms of processes and content. IOTA teams have come up with new templates to create activities, which will make it easier to offer new learning opportunities. They also have collected valuable feedback from teachers and pupils that they will process in a more efficient way: the fivefold increase in the number of classes this year means that certain tasks will have to be automated. The goal is ambitious: to open the project to even more classes next year with an infrastructure capable of meeting each and every pupil’s individual needs.

To move the IOTA project forward, we are basing ourselves on the same values of sharing and peer-learning that we want to teach students. The first workshops we proposed were on a small scale.
Marc Perrin, IOTA Project Coordinator