PILA is designed for students to develop 21st century competences, through engaging learning experiences that have built-in assessment.

But what exactly are 21st century competences?

They are the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students must develop to thrive in our highly interconnected and digitally-driven world. PILA offers 'learning assessments' for the following competences:

Creative thinking: being able to think innovatively, generate new ideas, and produce new and original solutions to problems.

Game Design: being able to shape enjoyable and interactive experiences through balanced mechanics, engaging narratives, and user-friendly interfaces.

Computational Problem Solving: being able to develop solutions to problems that can be executed by a computing machine. This is not just about learning programming languages – there are more abstract skills and concepts involved, such as breaking down problems into smaller, more manageable parts, recognising patterns and so on.

Causal Reasoning: being able to identify the nature of relationships between concepts that are causally linked.

Systems Thinking: the ability to understand a phenomenon as a system of interrelated elements that are causally. In short, this is the ability to piece together various causally related elements to form a working system.

Self-regulated Learning: the ability to manage and make decisions about one’s own learning processes – setting goals, planning strategies, managing emotions and monitoring progress.