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The World Conference on Computers in Education
The World Conference on Computers in Education took place in Switzerland last month. This Congress brought together more than 1000 people concerned with the development and use of computers in primary, secondary and university education. This Conference was organized by the Swiss Federation of Automatic Control, on behalf of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and had the backing of UNESCO and the Intergovernmental Bureau for Informatics (IBI, Rome).
In addition to the Congress, a youth world computer programming tournament was being held in different countries; the national winners were invited to present their entry at the Conference.
At the same time, an exhibition was set up to present educational material and a range of hardware and software, going from the smallest personal computer to the largest distributed informatics network, a concrete illustration of the multiple resources of these techniques applied to teaching and education.
The Conference put the accent on the relations between informatics and the teaching of other disciplines (computers in the teaching of physics, humanities at school, engineering, economics and social sciences), on instructional techniques (large scale experiments in computer aided learning – CAL) and on the impact of new technologies. Moreover, the social impact of informatics on teachers and students, as well as on leisure were discussed during WCCE.
Other participants presented reviews of national policies and models of computer education.