Teaching programming through the Arduino workshops at secondary schools

The State Education Program does not prescribe use of any particular programming environment in Slovak schools. It is up to each school or teacher which programming language or environment he/she decides to choose. Nowadays the most preferred programming languages at Slovak secondary schools are Python and Lazarus (some schools also use C/C++ or Java). However, these programming languages do not bring enough motivated students. Our Department of Computer Science at FNS UMB offers motivational workshops for secondary schools in region of Banská Bystrica. We would like to motivate students to proceed with study of Computer science in the future, because Slovakia reports a lack of IT professionals (but problem is worldwide). Main idea of these workshops is to show practical usage of programming for the students to increase the interest of IT with respect to interdisciplinary applications to the STEM subjects. In this article, we present our experiences with workshops in three different secondary schools with programming microcontroller Arduino.