The Children’s Congress: A Benefit to All Levels of Schooling by Strengthening Computational Thinking

Abstract

The Children’s Congress is an event, developed to meet a demand for strengthening computational thinking and to increase the interest in STEAM subjects. This congress brings teachers, university students and pupils together to work interdisciplinary on real-life problems. During these proceedings, the pupils slip into the role of researchers and scientists, supported by their teachers, university staff and university students. In every project team, at least one student from the Honors program of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz takes part. This support helps the pupils both in their projects and in their personal development, through mentoring by the talent students of the university. To find out more about these benefits and to improve the congress for the next years the Honors students were asked to give feedback after the congress. In these interviews, the Honors students described the Children’s Congress as a very inspiring and motivating project for all the participants. The results show that the students experienced a lot of appreciation through the work with the pupils, and that they faced many new challenges. They see many benefits for the pupils, starting from the increasing academical knowledge to skills like team- and time management. Furthermore, the benefit of getting used to computational thinking was described. Besides the advantages for the pupils, benefits for teachers were mentioned. Overall, the results show that the Children’s Congress successfully combines computational thinking, real-life problems, interdisciplinarity, project work and mentoring, benefitting all participants involved.