Overview

IT education and IT industry 

After creation of Hi-Tech Park Belarus has become one of the leading IT centers in the CIS and Eastern Europe. This is mostly due to the high level of IT education.

Various IT experts believe that large investment and flexibility in educational process are required to prepare good IT specialists. Active interaction between universities and HTP resident companies helps to achieve this goal.

Hi-Tech Park residents created and maintain more than 90 joint research and production laboratories based at universities. Moreover, residents developed and conduct targeted educational courses at specialized departments of universities. At the same time, more than 40 units of university departments were opened in the HTP residents’ offices and on the territory of Hi-Tech Park.

HTP residents actively invest in the education system. In particular, they supply equipment to universities, schools, lyceums, technical schools; contribute to organization of  seminars, republican and international competitions, conferences, Olympiads in physics, mathematics, informatics, trainings for teachers and students, as well as development of innovative entrepreneurship among young people.

 Project "Programming is the New Literacy"

 Skills of software developers in Belarus have been significantly enhanced thanks to the development of Hi-Tech Park. Therefore HTP professionals strongly believe that future career of a successful IT specialist starts from childhood.

In 2016 Hi-Tech Park together with the Ministry of Education launched the republican educational project "Programming is the new literacy".

Scratch educational programs were developed and implemented in all schools of the country. And today more than 47 thousand schoolchildren in Belarus learn programming optionally from the 2nd grade.

Every year Hi-Tech Park together with its residents organizes and conducts republican competition for schoolchildren "Programming in Scratch" and competition for teachers "My Scratch-History". 

Project "Computer science unplugged"

It is important to teach children basic knowledge of logic and algorithms starting from 5-6 years old.

It helps to form a special, "programmer" way of thinking from childhood.

Hi-Tech Park specialists developed methodology for forming algorithmic literacy without using a computer called "Computer science unplugged". It is developed to teach preschoolers and learn useful skills:   

• describe a task;

• identify important details needed to do a task;

• divide a task into small logical steps;

• use these steps to create a process (algorithm) to do this task;

• and then evaluate this process.

These skills can be applied to any other field, but they are especially relevant to designing digital system and doing tasks using computers.

Now the methodology is being tested in the republican pilot project and a number of regional educational projects in Minsk, Vitebsk and Mogilev regions. More than 2,000 preschoolers from 85 kindergartens  take part in it.