ubbu

• Increase equal access to education: ubbu’s goal is to reduce inequalities in the access to digital competencies. This funding contributes to increase equal access through offering free digital literacy education in Portuguese schools considered priority for educational intervention (TEIP). The program includes almost 17.800 students in priority intervention schools, having a goal of 60% of them reaching increased digital competencies after one school year – which means an expected outcome of over 10.600 students.
• Promotion of effective learning: ubbu’s digital literacy program covers Artificial Intelligence, Digital Security, and Financial Literacy for students from 1st to 6th grade. The students’ skills will be evaluated before and after interacting with ubbu’s platform to demonstrate improvement in digital competency levels in five areas: Information Literacy, Communication and Citizenship, Content Creation, Security and Privacy, and Solution Development.
• Ensure equal opportunity and reduction of inequalities: The program implemented by ubbu focuses on schools which are in territories with high number of children and teens with social vulnerability risk, aiming to ensure educational inclusion and success, to improve learning quality and avoid school dropout.
• Increase access to sustainability education: in the learning program, ubbu includes literacy around sustainability, including the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, focusing on developing citizenship skills at the same time.

ubbu, whose legal entity is UNICORN TREASURE, LDA, was founded in 2020 by João Magalhães and its cofounders with the mission to make computational thinking accessible to all children, regardless of their background. ubbu recognized two critical challenges in today's educational landscape: while children are increasingly consuming technology, they rarely learn to create with it, resulting in a significant gap in digital literacy skills.

ubbu teaches programming through game-based lessons - their students learn to build games, narratives, and program their own world! The age-appropriate curriculum is designed for children between 6 and 12 years old, and each of the lessons is aligned with multidisciplinary elements, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics), and at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal so that students also develop their citizenship skills!

This skills gap has broader implications for society. As technology sectors face talent shortages while other areas experience unemployment, the promoter saw an opportunity to address both issues by working with children from an early age, preparing them for future careers that may not even exist yet. Simultaneously, they observed that many countries are beginning to include computer science in their curricula, but most teachers lack the preparation and confidence to teach these subjects effectively. 

ubbu's solution is a comprehensive game-based learning platform that enables everyday classroom teachers without computer science experience to successfully teach coding and computational thinking to their students. The platform provides ready-to-use lessons, student progress tracking, and curriculum alignment, making it accessible for educators of all technical backgrounds.

What makes ubbu particularly valuable is its proven impact on broader academic performance. Multiple studies have shown that after using ubbo’s platform, students demonstrate improved mathematics scores, confirming that computational thinking skills enhance logical reasoning across subjects.

Today, ubbu has reached thousands of students across Portugal and beyond. They continuously develop new content in emerging areas like Artificial Intelligence, Digital Security, and Financial Literacy to ensure children become not just consumers of technology, but confident, creative digital citizens.

ubbu is part of the Code for All group, a B Corp certified edtech impact company that launched Academia de Código and Academia de Código Júnior in 2015. Academia de Código is the biggest in-person tech bootcamp brand in Portugal. Academia de Código Júnior was later renamed as ubbu, and the adult bootcamp Academia de Código was rebranded, in September 2023, and is now named Code for All.