HUNDREDS of primary school teachers are taking part in an initiative to help them develop the confidence, knowledge and skills to deliver computer science.
More than 40 per cent of the north's primary schools have signed up to The Barefoot Computing Project in its first year.
Barefoot helps primary educators build their confidence and provides resources, which have been designed by teachers and tailored to meet the needs of the curriculum.
It also provides free workshops.
The Barefoot programme is led by BT in Northern Ireland and supported by BCS - the Chartered Institute for IT, and Computing at School.
In the year since its launch, the programme has reached 42 per cent of primary schools. Volunteers have delivered more than 100 workshops to 1,000-plus teachers - reaching around 31,000 children.
Many more schools have also registered to use Barefoot's online resources, helping many more pupils make the most of lessons with a computing element.
St Mary's Aghlisnafin PS in Castlewellan registered last summer.
Principal Paddy Hardy said the resources and lesson plans were excellent because they had clearly been designed by teachers with experience in the classroom.
"The in-school training for staff has allowed us to introduce problem-solving into every class, not just maths, because tech literacy is now a fundamental building block of children's education," he said.
"We have always encouraged our P7 pupils to be reading buddies for some of the P1 children. Now we've got the older children helping the younger ones as their ICT buddies. That's thanks to the Barefoot programme."
Barefoot is part of BT’s tech literacy ambition and forms part of the company's long-term commitment to reach 5,000,000 young people in Britain and Northern Ireland by 2020.
Acting managing director of BT's Northern Ireland Networks division, Garret Kavanagh, said significant progress had been made since the Barefoot programme was launched.
"It's great to see so many local primary schools accessing the free resources to boost computing confidence in the classroom," he said.
"We're living in an increasingly digital world and tech literacy is now as important as reading and writing. That's why BT wants to encourage more schools in Northern Ireland to sign up to Barefoot."
BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, held a free training session for Barefoot volunteers at Stranmillis University College.
BCS Northern Ireland's Rachel McKane said volunteers would go into schools to talk to teachers about what they had to offer and work through some examples.
"They show that computational thinking is cross curricular and that, through practical activities, children can learn how to tackle challenges and solve problems through concepts such as abstraction, decomposition, algorithm, pattern, evaluation and logical thinking," she said.
