A Congress for Children and Computation...

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 participa-ting children can slip into the role of researchers and present theresults of their projects accomplished together with theirteachers as well as teacher students of different master courses.As preparation the project teams get an introduction into com-putational thinking and several computer science concepts withthe task of applying at least one of them in their project and thedevelopment of creative products. The themes of the Children’sCongress are relatively open and fit into every subject, becauseour main aim is introducing computational thinking “by theway” to all participants. During their work on cross-curricular oreven subject specific projects, pupils, students and teachers learnthat basics of computational thinking are or can be integrated inevery subject. This paper reports on the implementation andprocedure of the Children’s Congress and gives an overview ofthe projects accomplished in the first two years (2016 and 2017).It describes how and where computational thinking has beenintegrated and presents the main results of the evaluation gainedfrom interviews and questionnaires.