Extracurricular activities for improving the perception of informatics in secondary schools

In order to introduce informatic concepts to students of Italian secondary schools, we devised a number of interactive workshops conceived for pupils aged 10–17. Each workshop is intended to give pupils the opportunity to explore a computer science topic: investigate it firsthand, make hypotheses that can then be tested in a guided context during the activity, and construct viable mental models. This paper reports about how we designed and conducted these workshops.