Nearly 86 per cent of Bulgarian seventh-grade pupils spend all their free time in front of a computer, while 93 per cent have access to a computer at home, according to a study done for the country’s Education Ministry.
 
The study, done by the ministry’s Centre for Education Quality Control and quoted in Bulgarian-language daily Sega, said that spending their free time on the internet beat watching television into second place as the leisure pursuit of choice for Bulgarians in grade seven.
 
Thirty-eight per cent of 14-year-olds had visited pornographic sites, while 62 per cent had "come across" them while surfing the web, according to the survey.
 
The study was done among 916 pupils from 40 classes in 17 areas of Bulgaria.
 
Ninety-three per cent of pupils surveyed said that they had a home computer, of which 61 per cent said that it was theirs.
 
Their most popular choice of electronic communication was Skype, while 90 per cent used their computers to download music and films. Computers were used for homework preparation by 71.5 per cent, the survey found.
 
Ninety-five per cent owned mobile phones, and one in three used them to access the internet.
 
Those surveyed were given practical IT tests, producing an average score of 4.76 out of six, with 25 per cent scoring six, and pupils at mathematics specialist schools doing particularly well.
 
Among teachers of IT, 57 per cent had experience ranging from one to five years, and nine per cent less than that. Ninety-eight per cent of Bulgarian IT teachers believed that they were underpaid, the survey said.