Baku, December 14, AZERTAC

BP and its co-venturers in the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Shah Deniz, and South Caucasus Pipeline projects - SOCAR, TPAO, PETRONAS, MOL, LUKOIL, NICO, Equinor, INPEX, ExxonMobil, SGC, ITOCHU, ONGC, TOTAL and Eni - today announced the successful completion of their three-year educational project in support of improving Computer Science teaching in high schools of Azerbaijan. BP and its co-venturers funded this project as part of their commitment to supporting education and helping enhance local capabilities and skills at all levels.

The aim of the project was to equip high school students with modern and competitive Computer Science knowledge and skills to help them integrate into the new global information economy.

The project was launched in December 2017 in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Institute of Education. The full scope of the project has been successfully delivered resulting in preparation and application of a modern Computer Science curriculum for the 10th and 11th grades of secondary schools based on the international standards, development of new teaching and learning materials for the 10th and 11th grades to help the application of the new curriculum, provision of relevant trainings to high school teachers to improve the quality of Computer Science teaching.

The project covered 25 selected schools from Baku providing training to 50 teachers - 2 from each school, who now are piloting the effective use of the new curriculum. The teachers’ training programme included the English language and IT courses such as Computer Science in Modern World, Computer Science Principles and Topics in Computer Science.

Bakhtiyar Aslanbayli, BP’s Vice president Middle East and Caspian, Communications and Advocacy, said: “This is one of the very successful educational projects that we have delivered in collaboration with the Ministry of Education. We are pleased to see that the new curriculum as well as the new learning and teaching manuals are now being effectively used in 25 Baku schools helping the 50 teachers - participants in the project, do their job in a much more innovative and modern way. We hope that the success and the significant improvement of Computer Science teaching in the 25 selected schools will encourage other high schools to use the same curriculum and teaching materials. This would result in the countrywide expansion of this international standard educational practice. I would like to thank the Ministry of Education, the Institute of Education, the International Training and Project Centre, the teachers and all others involved in the project for their excellent collaboration for the benefit of about 1000 high schoolers and, hopefully, much more in the future.”

Mahabbat Valiyeva, Deputy Minister of Education of the Republic of Azerbaijan, said: “Computer Science represents one of the fastest growing career opportunities in the world. The project implemented jointly with BP and its co-venturers in Azerbaijan aims to encourage students from school years to understand what those opportunities are and choose their own career paths. We’d like to see our students not only as users of advanced ICT technologies, but also as those who design and engineer them. For this purpose, we developed teaching and learning materials within this pilot project to enhance logical thinking and problem-solving capabilities of high school students while equipping them with the essentials of Python programming.”

The total value of the project was about 800,000 AZN. The project was implemented by the International Training and Project Centre.