The Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia launched a new large-scale project Free Lessons to facilitate improvement of the quality of education, increase motivation of children to study, expand opportunities for informal education and contribute to creating an interesting and creative school life.

Free lessons mean the cycle of off-class/informal activities which are tailored to the interests of children. The content and study methodology is distinguished from typical study process; the children do not have to do homework, they do not get grades and the children and teachers have an opportunity to carry out creative activities.

Within the program, the following activities were defined: sport activities, development of literacy, culture, art, intellectual-cognitive activities.

Free lessons will be funded under the grant provided by the Ministry for the schools. The maximum amount of the grant per each school will be GEL 3000 for the salary fund of teachers, administrative staff and resources necessary for the projects.

In 2017, the children of VII-VIII grades will be engaged in free lessons. The sport activities for the projects will be no more than 40 hours, as for other directions, 20 hours per each.

Before the project is fully up and operating, 15 schools will carry out the pilot projects for several weeks. One of these schools is a public school No157 where free lessons are conducted in programming to teach the children the basics in this area. The children created various computer heroes, made some GIFs and after the lesson cycle is finished, they will create their own computer game. The course is conducted by the school IT and communication technology teacher and the project partner organizations are Microsoft Georgia and Educare Georgia.

Lia Gigauri, deputy minister of Education and Science visited the school together with the representatives of partner companies and attended the study process.