松江市におけるプログラミング教育の普及推進事業　：　官民学の連携の試みに着目して

Ruby City MATSUE Project’s aims are regional development attracting IT companies and IT human resource development. Programming education for school children has started with the strong intention of the Mayor of Matsue City. Programming education of junior high school in Matsue succeeded under the collaboration with public, private and academic sectors. Koji Takao, an engineer and chairperson of the nonprofit organization ‘Ruby Programming Shounendan’, helped school teachers conducting programming classes with study of teaching materials, teaching method, coding in Smalruby, etc. Smalruby is a free and block-based visual programming language, implemented in Ruby, created by Takao in 2014. With other engineers and students, he also conducts educational activities for children and their parents, in order that they recognize what programming is. He, as a member of CorerDojo Japan, also gives workshops in the area of Shimane prefecture. Shimane University and National Institute of Technology Matsue College include ‘Ruby’ and ‘Ruby on Rails’ in their curriculum. Shimane prefecture holds Smalruby Programming Koshien, a programming competition for students under the age of 18, every year. Some who once learned programming at junior high school have become IT engineers and got jobs in Matsue. Programming education has started at every elementary school in Japan in 2020. Teachers study how to teach programming for children, and engineers can support and advise them in Matsue. Concerning to programming education, Matsue holds a broader supporting system. The project is an educational program that is open to society.