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This year’s rasPETLJAvanje cycle, held from late November 2024 to early March 2025, brought together over 300 participants from 96 municipalities across Serbia, with girls making up 36% and boys 63% of the group. Now in its third consecutive year, the program has so far engaged more than 900 students from all over the country.

The program is designed to introduce participants to the basics of algorithmic thinking and programming in an engaging and accessible way. Over the course of three months, students worked on tasks covering everything from setting up programming environments and using input/output operations to working with matrices. Special focus was placed on understanding errors in code and developing debugging skills as a key part of learning to program.

Based on age and results from a logic and math entry test, participants were divided into five groups and guided by mentors—students from technical faculties—who provided a personalized learning experience. Their close age and shared interests with the participants helped build motivation and made it easier to grasp complex concepts.

Participants were assigned to online classrooms on our platform, allowing mentors to track individual progress and adjust the structure and pace of mentoring sessions accordingly.

At any time, students could revisit lessons they found unclear and ask mentors questions via the chat feature available in their online classrooms.

Mentor support was one of the most frequently mentioned highlights in the evaluation forms completed by participants at the end of the program:

“My mentors were amazing! They were always ready to help and explain things in a way that was easy to understand... making me feel confident during the learning process.”

More than 95% of participants who filled out the evaluation form rated their mentors with the highest scores on a 1-to-5 scale, while the overall program received an average rating of 4.57.

Most students noted that the lessons were useful, clear, and engaging.

“What I liked most was the challenge of solving complex problems that required creativity and resourcefulness in programming.”

In addition to praise, we also received valuable suggestions for improving the program—from requests for more interactive elements to ideas for topics to include in future cycles. One of the most frequently mentioned was working with Pygame.

At the end of the program, the most active participants were awarded rasPETLJAvanje-themed T-shirts.

This activity was organized by the Petlja Foundation as part of the project "Building Key Computing Competencies – Toward the Workforce of the Future", implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with the Ministry of Education and with support from the Government of the Republic of Serbia.