Digital Literacy Bulgaria Project #38700

Prepare Bulgarian Kids for the Jobs of the Future

by Telerik Academy Foundation

Project Report | Jun 1, 2022
Thank you for your support for another productive school year

By Petar Sharkov | CEO

Graduation students - Plovdiv

As the 2021/2022 school year comes to an end, we are so happy to share with you the results of this productive and successful one. Your continued support allows us to deliver on our mission to introduce Bulgarian kids to the world of technologies and give them access to quality and modern training every year.

Summary of 2021-2022

With your help, we reached a record during the 2021/2022 academic year:

Launched 130 cohorts in 41 cities and villages across Bulgaria, compared to 113 cohorts in 33 settlements last year.
Offered training to over 2,800 students, compared to 2,500 last year.
Increased our teachers pool and partnered with92 contractors compared to 65 last year.
Expanded our network of supporters, attracting a larger number of individual donors, private companies, foundations, and municipalities.

The change in Covid-19 restrictions allowed for most of our cohorts to return to onsite trainings. Students and teachers are happy to meet in person and finish the trainings on a high note.

End of the school year

Currently, our cohorts are at the end of their training and soon we will be able to congratulate students and trainers on the successful conclusion of the school year and share their accomplishments with you.

Despite the prolonged pandemic and challenges of the online training both students and teachers are happy with the opportunity, our trainings provided them, and we receive daily new testimonials of appreciation and satisfaction. We are pleased to share two of them with you:

„TAS classes are a place where students, in addition to gaining knowledge, meet and communicate with others with similar interests and ambitions. They find themselves in an environment that is different from the standard class, and this is very useful for their growth“, says our trainer in Silistra, Mrs Neykova.

“It’s my second year at Telerik Academy School. I enjoy the classes no matter if they are live or online - the atmosphere is extremely creative, and I really like the way we learn new things. Additional value brings the fact that I already know what I want to do after I graduate from school.", shares Boris, student from Sofia.

Microdonation campaigns

In our efforts to further engage our community and differentiate our sources of funding, we launched microdonation campaigns aimed at several distinct groups:

parents of our current students
employees of software companies
local communities

Currently, some of the campaigns are still ongoing, but we are seeing very positive results in terms of engagement and contributions and will further explore such approaches. We already have more than 160 new individual contributors and the collected funds will support the training of over 320 children for a month.

Long term impact of our activities since 2010

We continue publicizing the results of the external evaluation of our work through the past 11 years and during the reporting period we started sharing the positive findings with a wider public. We are happy to announce that an Infographic with the main conclusions and the Executive summary of the research are available on our website.

We are also extremely proud to share the success stories of our students, highlighted in the report. In case you understand Bulgarian, you could browse those interesting articles:

An example highlight: Alex is one of our students who took the most out of his training in TAS and exhibited our value of giving back and helping the community. He enrolled and participated in all our programs. During his training, Alex became a helper to his teachers and mentor to his classmates by providing support and clarification to those who needed it. He shares that this role has helped him grow and learn the most.

Thanks to his proactive nature and the skills and knowledge he acquired Alex started his first job when he was 16 years old, where he remained until the beginning of the 12th grade. After that, he was hired by a British startup and currently, he is working at a big software company in Bulgaria.

What is next

Looking towards the 2022/2023 school year, our focus is to secure the continuation of our current partnerships, optimize cohorts in existing settlements and expand our reach geographically, providing opportunities for a diversified pool of students, ensuring financial support from a wide array of sources, and polishing our existing programs. We also plan updates to our age groups and training length to answer better the needs of students.
We are planning an extensive and exciting summer training program for our growing network of trainers, where we will present the improvements to programs, models of implementation and systems we are preparing for next year.

Thanks to your support, and all-new partners and supporters, we are close to reaching our goal - to open 130 cohorts next school year. This will give nearly 2,900 students from around the country the chance to receive completely free, high-quality digital technology training to prepare them for the professions of the future.

Your trust allows us to change the destinies of thousands of students in Bulgaria every year, preparing them for a successful professional path.

We would happily welcome suggestions for prospective donors and partners: private companies, individuals, local administrations, schools, and local facilities who would support our cause. Let us know if you have any ideas!

Your continued support and engagement make it possible for us to provide Bulgarian kids with equal access to digital skills training, improving their abilities and opening doors to their future development. Thank you for your valuable contribution!

Graduation students - Veliko Tarnovo

Graduation students - Ruse

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Mar 2, 2022
Training kids across Bulgaria and looking towards the future

By Petar Sharkov | CEO

During this reporting period, our team has been hard at work to ensure successful cohort continuation across the country, despite the limitations posed by the pandemic. We are also looking towards the 2022/2023 school year and planning its delivery.

This school year, we:

opened cohorts in 41 settlements across Bulgaria;
offered training to over 2800 students in our programs
work with 92 contractors.

Extracurricular activities were strongly affected by the measures related to the pandemic, and the vast majority of our training is being delivered online during this school year. We work closely with our teachers to monitor the groups development and offer expert and administrative support whenever necessary and address the individual needs and specifics in each case.Believing in the strength of developing personal relations between participants to improve the quality of learning our teachers organize open-air team building meetings as often as possible.We are hopeful that, with improving health statistics and alleviated restrictions, more and more of our cohorts will be able to meet for some live classes around the end of the school year and finish on a high note.

What’s next

We are looking forward to a successful completion of the current school year. Our students are doing outstanding work, despite the ongoing isolation, and we’re confident their final projects will be as good as ever.

Preparing to launch the next school year with 130 cohorts we lay the foundations now.

Our team is gearing up to continue delivering the best possible programming and digital skills training to young people in Bulgaria, for free. We believe our work is addressing an important challenge young people are facing. Improving their digital skills will help them build a better future for themselves and our country.

We are hard at work to ensure that the next school year is even more successful than the current one. To achieve this, we have initiated our fundraising campaign to gather the necessary support. At this point in time, we have gathered enough to open 80 cohorts and have 50 more to ensure funding for.

Besides relying on our extraordinary existing pool of supporters, we are also looking to establish new partnerships with private businesses, individuals, and institutions to help us provide even more children with access to our programs.

Do you have ideas for potential supporters, who can stand behind our cause? Let us know!

In March, we will launch an early bird campaign to allow interested students to sign up for our September admission earlier. This campaign allows us to understand the level of interest towards our programs in different locations, and further contributes to our planning efforts.

During the summer, we will again deliver an extensive teacher training program, in order to prepare our contractors and further build our community.

As always, we are extending our utmost gratitude to you for your continued support. Your contributions make it possible to open doors for the kids of Bulgaria.

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Dec 3, 2021
Successful start of the new school year 2021/2022

By Petar Sharkov | CEO

The past three months marked an intensive and successful beginning of the new school year. The period laid the foundation for the upcoming months, and we are closing the calendar year with a sense of accomplishment and gratitude for your continued support.

What we achieved

New school year has begun successfully

During this reporting period, we carried out an admission campaign in all 41 settlements across Bulgaria and launched most cohorts, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic. We are happy to report that, thanks to the support of all our donors and partners, this year we will:

Offer training to over 2800 students in our programs;
Carry out 129 cohorts in 41 settlements;
Work with 92 contractors.

We would like to highlight some milestones we achieved in the past three months:

Successful admission campaign: in September and October, interested students had the opportunity to apply online for our cohorts throughout the country. Students in grades 4-12 could choose between 5 interactive programs in the field of digital technology and programming, each with a duration of 100 teaching hours and corresponding to their age and interests. For the youngest (grades 1-3) programming workshops are planned in Sofia in partnership with CoderDojo Bulgaria. We had over 5000 applicants.
The campaign included coordination with all our contractors, local partners, educational institutions, regional and national media and active initiatives for announcing the opportunity on the local level.
Start of teaching in our partner STEM centers: our new initiative, partnership with 6 schools providing programs and teacher training to be implemented in their STEM centers , which is funded by the Ministry of Education, has officially begun. Through our partnerships, we trained 17teaching staff and provided them with learning materials in different combinations of our educational programs, based on the priorities and strategy of each school.
In order to fulfill our ambitious plans of expanding our reach, we are continuing to engage with current and have started conversations with some potential new partners and donors to attract support for the next school year.

Our impact in the last 11 years

As mentioned in previous reports, this year we worked in cooperation with our main donor, the America for Bulgaria Foundation, on an external evaluation carried out by an independent expert organization. GlobalMetrics, a sociological agency, conducted an impact assessment of our work which included interviews and surveys with teachers, alumni and their parents, as well as several detailed case studies. We are dedicated to continuous improvement and data-based decision making, and the findings in the report give us insights for our future development and assure us that what we have done until now truly matters.

Some key highlights we’re proud to share:

In the last 2 academic years, TAS participants received 39 of the 64 awarded medals at national competitions. TAS trainees constituted 61% of the Bulgarian participants at the six international competitions in the past three years for which data was available.
TAS has a significant impact on the labor market in Bulgaria: In 2020, 78% of our alumni who worked were engaged in activities that are related to computer technologies and programming, 93% of the estimated 1,850 18+ TAS alumni who had IT-related jobs worked in Bulgaria, amounting to about 4.5% of the whole work force employed in the sector.
A total of 91% of our current and former teachers indicated that they had improved their teaching methods by upgrading already known or learning new approaches. 94% of them applied what they learned in TAS in their regular practice.
The skills junior trainees reported most frequently to have improved are: development of logical thinking (74%), programming skills (63%), game-making skills (55%), and increased speed of learning and processing information (54%). Simultaneously, students discovered their interest in the field of computer technologies (72%), increased their confidence when using computers and the Internet (68%), and took advantage of opportunities to communicate with their peers who have similar interests (65%).

Looking ahead

This school year promises to be as challenging as the previous one, due to the ever-changing circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic which affects students and teachers alike. Our trainings are already underway and will give over 2800 children and young people the opportunity to improve their digital skills and prepare for the jobs of the future. The format of our trainings (online or in-person) for all cohorts will follow the official healthcare guidelines, observing the safety of our students and contractors.

Over the next months, our efforts will be directed at the successful delivery of our programs across the country, retaining students’ interest and motivation, supporting teachers, securing funding and donor support from current partners and attracting new ones for the next school year, and working on delivering improvements to our learning system and programs.

We would like to take the time to extend our utmost gratitude to you, our donors, who are making this journey for all our kids possible. We would not be able to make it without your support, and we have lots more in store for the future!

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