Coding Girls & Women: even primary school children at university
Just a few hours have passed since the Palermo leg of the tour by Coding Girls & Women, which is visiting Italy’s main university cities across twelve events, with a focus on various aspects of technological disciplines: from artificial intelligence to data science, from robotics to cybersecurity [see the news item Coding Girls & Women, Hackathon in Palermo]. The emotions are still intense and very much alive in the mind and heart of the project coordinator, Cecilia Stajano: “Palermo is so many things, and I can’t even begin to describe them! Here, there is nothing that cannot be done – and done well. The vitality, creativity, industriousness and, above all, intellectual generosity that you breathe in here is what the south always has to offer, wherever you go. We started Coding Girls many years ago almost on the quiet, and yet Palermo and its university community have been the cradle of all the innovations introduced in the project. University lecturers and those in Sicilian schools are doing vital work to make their students increasingly confident in their skills – the only true means of growing up freely and making their own choices independently.”
In Palermo, local roots become a driver of innovation. The collaboration with the university, the participation of schools, the presence of tutors and the openness to new subject areas demonstrate how digital skills flourish best when linked to vibrant communities, trusting relationships and real-world problems.
The Palermo leg confirms a now recognisable mission: not merely to be a training opportunity, but an environment for educational experimentation. Here, Coding Girls & Women takes the form of a true ecosystem, capable of bringing together university departments, schools of all levels, tutors, teachers, and students around a shared vision of the future: making STEM more accessible, more tangible and closer to people’s lives.
Involving primary school children means tackling stereotypes before they become barriers. The university thus opens up as a space for discovery and familiarity, not as a distant place to be reached ‘one day’, but as an environment one can enter from a young age to observe, experiment, build and ask questions. The strength of the model lies in the continuity of the educational pathway: children discover, teenagers design, university students guide, teachers innovate teaching practices, and the local community identifies with a shared endeavour. It is this alliance between different ages, roles and skills that transforms a day in the workshop into a community investment.
Once again this year, the figures and new developments for the Palermo leg are impressive: five educational streams, eight university departments involved, ten schools, 60 tutors across secondary school programmes and primary school activities – a new feature for 2026. For secondary schools, 150 students took part, whilst for primary schools, 155 children were involved, accompanied by students from the Primary Education programme.
For primary schools, the programme focused on augmented reality and STEM learning, with investigative and discovery activities designed to introduce children to science, geometry and digital fabrication. Secondary schools, meanwhile, worked on five challenges: “Coding with Arduino”, “Data is us”, “Code&Rock. The Earth that speaks in code”, “How does data travel?”, “The Chemistry Metaverse”. The challenges translated technology into real-world contexts: energy and sustainability in school environments, critical data analysis, digital communication, earth sciences, immersive chemistry and augmented reality.
A way of showing that coding is not an isolated skill, but a language for understanding phenomena, solving problems and imagining solutions.
“Encouraging young people to engage with STEM subjects through concrete, collaborative and inclusive experiences means offering them essential tools to build the future and sparking an interest that can help them find their own path. The participation and enthusiasm we have seen today confirm just how important it is to create innovative learning opportunities right from the earliest years of education,” said the Vice-Rector for the Right to Education and Innovation in Learning Processes and President of TLC-CIMDU, Luisa Amenta.
“This Palermo edition represented an important moment of growth and experimentation. We have built a learning ecosystem in which universities, schools and tutors have worked together to make STEM accessible, engaging and relevant to the language of the younger generations,” emphasised the UniPa Coordinator of the Coding Girls & Women project, Antonella Maggio, a teaching mentor at the University.
The event actively involved the campus of the University of Palermo, in collaboration with the Centre for Innovation and Improvement in University Teaching TLC-CIMDU at the University of Palermo. Another new feature of the Palermo edition was the inclusion of earth sciences, with courses that brought together coding, data and the environment.
The schools in Palermo involved are Margherita Hack, Convitto nazionale Giovanni Falcone, Boccadifalco Tomasi di Lampedusa, Cinisi, Federico II di Svevia, Ettore Majorana, Benedetto Croce, Felicia e Peppino Impastato, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, Giovanni Meli.
The winners
The winning projects clearly reflect the variety of challenges: solutions for energy saving, devices for safety and accessibility, analysis of lifestyle-related data, communication networks between microcontrollers, immersive visualisations of molecules, and creative applications for understanding earthquakes and natural phenomena. These are still prototype ideas, but they are already capable of linking learning, scientific citizenship and social responsibility.
For the “Coding with Arduino” challenge: the Innovation prize went to the Green Founders team from Liceo Meli. The project proposes an Arduino-based system to reduce energy waste in classrooms, with an LCD display showing actions taken and energy saved, alongside a gamification system between classes. The Creativity Award went to the I Candelabri team from the Felicia Peppino Impastato Institute for a project on classroom temperature regulation with a fire prevention system. The Inclusion Award went to the Errore 404 team, also from Felicia Peppino Impastato, for a project involving a device that switches on when windows are opened and closed.
For the challenge “We are the data”, the Majorana Institute won: the Originality Award went to the ‘data five’ team for analysing a dataset and creating infographics. The Innovation Award went to the ‘Coding life’ team for their project analysing students’ lifestyles, and finally, the Inclusion Award was won by the ‘miniciccioli’ team for their analysis of an e-commerce dataset visualising purchases and user satisfaction.
For the “How data travels” challenge: the Originality prize went to Client Esp32 from the Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa Institute for their project involving a chat system between multiple clients and a server. The Inclusivity prize went to the Bho team from Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, who presented a project on how data travels based on the Esp32 chat code (the ESP32 microcontroller exchanges text or voice messages).
Innovation Award to the Dream Team from the Educandato Maria Adelaide for their PowerPoint project on Coding Girls.
For “Code & Rock”, the winning teams were from the Felicia and Peppino Impastato Institute: the Idoli, who used the sounds of earthquakes to recreate musical backing tracks inspired by hip-hop, Sisma Guesser with a programme on Google Colab that allows users to identify the geographical location of an earthquake, and finally Le Magnitudo 4, who presented a simulation of the propagation of S- and P-waves during an earthquake.
The prizes for the “Augmented Reality with Chemistry” challenge went to the Evon team from the Benedetto Croce High School (Innovation prize) for a gallery of molecules, and to the Connessioni Molecolari team from the Felicia and Peppino Impastato High School (Inclusivity prize) for a room within a gallery featuring a fucoxanthin molecule. Finally, the MetaMolecole team from the Felicia e Impastato Institute was awarded the prize for originality for their virtual gallery exploring the dye Malachite Green.
The Palermo leg thus highlights one of the programme’s most promising directions: not merely introducing girls and women to technology, but building educational environments in which everyone can recognise themselves as competent. From primary school to university, from laboratories to design, Coding Girls & Women tackles a cultural challenge even before a technical one: making STEM a welcoming, inclusive and generative space.
The aim of the national programme Coding Girls & Women, supported by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies (Call 2/2024) and to be implemented in partnership with companies, local institutions and third sector organisations, including the Lisca Bianca ETS association, is to build an ecosystem capable of supporting people in developing digital, scientific and cross-disciplinary skills, thereby promoting access to and retention within the STEM world. The target audience comprises students, postgraduate students and researchers, teachers, parents, women in vulnerable situations and young people transitioning from education to work. The project comprises local activities designed to engage educational communities and citizens, including coding workshops, awareness and personal development sessions (using the Personal Ecosystem Canvas), thematic workshops on emerging technologies, recreational workshops and pilot schemes, peer-to-peer training and sessions with university tutors, career guidance sessions with role modelling, workshops on inclusive entrepreneurship and the blue economy, support in building professional profiles, hackathons and creative competitions with mixed teams (schools and universities), and co-design sessions (Lego Serious Play). Collaborations with companies and institutions continue, including ING, Microsoft, Google.org, Micron Foundation.
