A congress for children and computational thinking for everyone

Abstract

As final event of the project "Informatics - A Child's Play?!", which aimed at introducing computational thinking in primary and secondary schools, the authors initiated the first Children's Congress in 2016 with the main theme of "Languages - Pictures - Information". This is now an annual event, where all participating children can slip into the role of researchers and present the results of their projects accomplished together with their teachers as well as teacher students of different master courses. As preparation the project teams get an introduction into computational thinking and several computer science concepts with the task of applying at least one of them in their project and the development of creative products. The themes of the Children's Congress are relatively open and fit into every subject, because our main aim is introducing computational thinking "by the way" to all participants. During their work on cross-curricular or even subject specific projects, pupils, students and teachers learn that basics of computational thinking are or can be integrated in every subject. This paper reports on the implementation and procedure of the Children's Congress and gives an overview of the projects accomplished in the first two years (2016 and 2017). It describes how and where computational thinking has been integrated and presents the main results of the evaluation gained from interviews and questionnaires.