The Children’s Congress: Creative Computational Thinking to Promote

Gifted Pupils

Sara Hinterplattner

1 a

, Barbara Sabitzer

1 b

, Heike Demarle-Meusel

1 c

and Simon Schneiderbauer

2 d

Department of STEM Education, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Department of Particulate Flow Modelling, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Keywords:

Computational Thinking, Interdisciplinarity, Creativity, Gifted Education, Project-based Learning.

Abstract:

The Children’s Congress is an event, developed to meet a demand for strengthening computational thinking

and increasing the interest in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) subjects.

This congress brings teachers, university students and pupils together to work on interdisciplinary real-life

problems. During these proceedings, the pupils slip into the role of researchers and scientists. The Children’s

Congress aims at inspiring pupils, students and teachers to work with computational thinking in different

subjects, as well as promoting the concept of working in an inter- or transdisciplinary way. It is a core value

of the Children’s Congress that the project should challenge and beneﬁt everyone involved. At university it

was shown that students need special requirements in talent promotion to be successful: creating community,

offering freedom and enhancing academic competence. In this paper we want to ﬁnd out if the project offers

these requirements and their effects. The ﬁndings show that the Children’s Congress includes all pillars of

gifted education and moreover that the pupils enjoyed these pedagogical approaches. Besides, the Children’s

Congress helps to detect new talents and trains all participants in computational thinking and cross-curricular

project-based learning.

1 INTRODUCTION

Gifted pupils have by deﬁnition above average abili-

ties enabling them to acquire new knowledge quickly

and to understand new concepts almost immediately

(Gronostaj et al., 2016). They already know 40-

60% of the content that is being taught (Coleman and

Cross, 2005) and they are usually fast learners, need

minimal instructions and have an excellent memory

(Harrison, 2004; Webb et al., 2008). These issues

make it necessary to offer pupils projects in the class-

room giving the possibility to do more than the usual

tasks. One possibility to challenge gifted pupils in this

way is to do inter- or transdisciplinary projects, which

require their creativity and academic knowledge in a

complex way. In doing so it is important to offer dif-

ferent and individual tasks for the pupils, because ev-

ery pupil has different abilities and interests. If pupils

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9601-433X

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1304-6863

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4897-757X

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7690-9884

can work in the right balance between the perceived

challenges of the task and their own perceived skills

a ﬂow state can be entered. A ﬂow state describes the

optimal state in which a person performing an activ-

ity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus,

full involvement, and enjoyment in the process (Csik-

szentmihalyi, 1990).

One solution to achieve this advantageous state

is the Children’s Congress, which combines these

challenges with computational thinking. The lat-

ter describes a problem-solving process with distinc-

tive problem-solving techniques and general intellec-

tual practices. It covers solving problems, design-

ing systems and understanding human behavior by

drawing on the concepts of computers (Wing, 2006).

These concepts should increase the interest in com-

puter science, correct possible misconceptions and

work against existing fears and inhibitions concern-

ing computer science and new technologies.

In university context Wolfensberger (2012) found

out that gifted students call for a speciﬁc pedagogi-

cal approach by teachers. She formulated the three

pillars of Honors Pedagogy: creating community, en-

Hinterplattner, S., Sabitzer, B., Demarle-Meusel, H. and Schneiderbauer, S.

The Children’s Congress: Creative Computational Thinking to Promote Gifted Pupils.

DOI: 10.5220/0009576902770284

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2020) - Volume 1, pages 277-284

ISBN: 978-989-758-417-6

277

hancing academic competence, and offering freedom;

(Wolfensberger, 2012). In this paper we want (1) to

unveil if the Children’s Congress offers the potential

to provide these requirements and, if it does, (2) to

reach the effects of these three pillars in the school

context. Results of the questionnaires of 183 pupils

were examined to answer the following questions:

1. Does the Children’s Congress support participants

to create a community, enhance academic knowl-

edge and offer freedom for the pupils?

2. How are the pupils’ experiences with these 3 pil-

lars of Honors Pedagogy in the project?

2 THE CHILDREN’S CONGRESS

2.1 Aims

The concept of the children’s congress was developed

as part of the ”Informatics - A Child’s Play?!” project

(Sabitzer et al., 2014; Sabitzer and Demarle-Meusel,

2018). The main aim of the Children’s Congress is to

foster and implement computational thinking in reg-

ular classes in the medium or long term. Computa-

tional thinking is understood as the application of IT

concepts to various ”non-IT” problems (Wing, 2006).

Experience has shown that short-term interventions

(e.g. individual workshops) have only minor effects.

With its setting, the Children’s Congress offers the

possibility of a long-term discussion of a topic by

working on a project for one semester. A speciﬁc fea-

ture is the collaboration of various stakeholders and

target groups of education: these are scientists, uni-

versity students, teachers and pupils. Such a collab-

oration creates synergies, which are beneﬁcial for all

target group. It is particularly important that project

work implemented in the Children’s Congress specif-

ically supports pupils. It is encouraged that the Chil-

dren’s Congress has a different focus each year, where

it should be emphasized that focus is chosen broad

enough allowing to host a wide range of projects and

subjects. The creativity of the participants is encour-

aged as soon as they come up with ideas. The only

requirement is that the project idea must be linked to

computational thinking. For this, the schools are sup-

ported by the university (scientists and students). The

project implementation at school should be interdis-

ciplinary and problem-based. In addition to the fun

and learning success that the pupils have when im-

plementing the project, the overriding goal is to pro-

mote interest in IT and STEAM. The highlight and

conclusion of the Children’s Congress is the congress

day, on which all projects and developed products are

presented and tried out. At the end a jury awards

the best three projects. Besides promoting compu-

tational thinking the Children’s Congress aims at de-

tecting new talents and inspire interdisciplinary teach-

ing. Furthermore, it interweaves teacher pre- and in-

service training with regular school lessons in a way

that anyone (any target group) can beneﬁt or learn

from each other.

2.2 Setup

The project teams are made up of pupils (aged 7 to 14

years), university students and teachers. The pupils

have to work as researchers and developers. They

have to solve a real-world problem and to develop an

innovative, creative (digital) product. In this process

they get support by their teachers and students from

university. The students are from the education pro-

gram or from the honors program of our university.

The project starts with the Kick-Off Event, where

the teachers present the ﬁrst ideas of their pupils.

Based on these presentations project teams are built,

which consist of one or two teachers and one or

two students. Following this ﬁrst Kick-Off Event the

project work in the Preparation Phase starts. The

pupils have half a year to work on their project. In

this process they regularly visit the university to at-

tend workshops in the STEM ﬁeld and for students’

support. At the end the ﬁnal event brings together

all teachers, classes and students: The Children’s

Congress. At this event the pupils present their ideas,

their work and their ﬁnal products, which can be

tested by all attendees. A jury consisting of univer-

sity professors evaluates the projects and awards the

best three teams.

2.3 The Children’s Congress 2019

Every congress has a main topic very general, which

is open to every school subject. Thus, it is elaborated

as interdisciplinary projects. At the Johannes Kepler

University (JKU) in Linz (Austria), the topic of the

2019’s congress was “From the problem to the solu-

tion: Computational Thinking in everyday life”. A

total of 230 pupils worked with 23 teachers and 12

university students on 12 projects. The participating

pupils were from 12 different schools in Upper Aus-

tria and from grades 1 to 8. An overview about the

projects and the participating pupils can be found in

Table 1.

Most of the project ideas were developed and ﬁ-

nalized at the Kick-off event. The pupils itself de-

veloped research questions during the Preparation

Phase. This phase, where all of the project members

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Table 1: The Projects presented at the 2019’s Children’s Congress at JKU Linz.

Projects Pupils Grade

12/4/3: How can a poet visit 12 countries on 4 continents in 3 minutes? 24 3

ABC - activity based coding 48 0-4

Audio & video factory 11 6+7

How can initial programming be developed for primary school children? 22 4

Interaction human and computer 16 6+8

Learning success and self-control with Bee-Bots 18 6

Learning with the micro:bit 6 22

My Garden App 24 5

My heart beats for you 19 5

Social bot – friendly robot experience 10 7+8

Trafﬁc safety and urban planning using interactive models 12 8

Writing personal descriptions supported by diagrams 20 3

worked together, amounted from 10 to 20 hours per

team in total. The time that was spent by the pupils,

students and teachers in total for the project was be-

tween 20 and 50 hours per person.

In the project “12/4/3: How can a poet visit 12

countries on 4 continents in 3 minutes?” the pupils

dealt with their home countries. They did research

on the geography and culture among others. In this

process they painted a big earth map where a robot

was visiting one country after each other. The pupils

”taught” the robot the traditional dance from each

country, which was shown through its path. Addi-

tionally, class diagrams with useful information about

every country were presented. The project bears this

name since the involved pupils or their parents orig-

inate from 12 different countries located on 4 differ-

ent continents, while the robot only takes 3 minutes

for its whole journey. Figure 1 shows the map of the

countries, some of the presenting children and visi-

tors. Figure 2 shows an Ozobot with a passenger on it

travelling across some of the countries. This Ozobot

was also used in the following project.

In the project “ABC - activity based coding” the

children from preschool to the 4th grade showed

insights into programming languages by using dif-

ferent robots and software like Beebots, OzoBots,

OzoBlockly, Scratch and Lego WeDo among others.

This was done across all grades and was used in a

wide range of teaching subjects to ensure interdisci-

plinarity. Therefore the pupils wrote for example, es-

says on robots in their German classes or discussed

dimensions and geometry in Mathematics classes.

The “Audio & video factory”-project aimed at

teaching the pupils the basics about movie edit-

ing software, downloading and manipulating videos,

camera setting and ﬁle formats among others to

strengthen their abilities to produce a movie. Next

to the technical aims, a major goal of this project was

Figure 1: Project “12/4/3: How can a poet visit 12 countries

on 4 continents in 3 minutes?” The robots with feathers in

the ﬂag’s countries dance the traditional dances.

to deal with bullying. The ﬁnal product was a short

movie about bullying in school in particular about the

awareness and the avoidance.

In the “How can initial programming be devel-

oped for primary school children?” the pupils tried

different approaches to get to a ﬁrst understanding of

programming. In this process they compared different

programming languages and robots.

The research question in the “Interaction human

and computer”-project was how it is possible to com-

The Children’s Congress: Creative Computational Thinking to Promote Gifted Pupils

279

Figure 2: Project 12/4/3 - Ozobot travelling through coun-

tries.

municate with a robot. The pupils did a lot of research

and at the end created a program to interact with a

robot.

The pupils in the project “Learning success and

self-control with Bee-Bots” developed different game-

based programs to check their learning success. This

included a memory, robots who check the answer to

a given task or hot-potatoes-tasks (quizzes and puz-

zles). All challenges where designed interactively and

in a user-friendly and motivating way.

The “Learning with the micro:bit”-project-team

developed a “Who wants to be a milionaire”-game

with questions regarding the classes’ learning con-

tents. The answers were then checked with the mi-

cro:bit.

The “My Garden App” is a smartphone app that

helps with the gardening. It tells when to sow the dif-

ferent kinds of vegetables and fruits, when they are

ready to harvest and gives other tips and hints for gar-

dening. For trying different kinds of vegetables and

fruits points can be gained, which may unlock more

varieties.

The research question of the “My heart beats for

you”-project is: How do i recognize friends that ﬁt to

me?’ In this process the project team built a measur-

ing device that determines pulse and oxygen concen-

tration in the blood (saturation). The collected data

is linked to a database using Excel macros, which are

then assigned in a playful manner using psychologi-

cal studies to create social links. The playful character

and the exploration of social bonds was the focus of

this project.

The “Social bot – friendly robot experience” de-

veloped a robot that intervenes when people argue.

From the draft to the prototype, they dealt with the

question of whether and to what extent digital media

and new technologies can help in interpersonal rela-

tionships. Where does the authority of the machine

begin and end, what rights, obligations, ethical prin-

ciples must or can a robot notice?

In the project “Trafﬁc safety and urban planning

using interactive models the pupils visited and also

photographed danger spots on the way to school.

These danger spots were also closely examined in

Google Maps. Subsequently this information was

sketched on paper, where additionally small clay

bricks served as models of the surrounding houses.

By using robots, cars and pedestrians, various danger-

ous situations could be simulated on the street models.

In the project “Writing personal descriptions sup-

ported by diagrams” the pupils planned and prepared

personal descriptions of their class mates with the

help of class and activity diagrams. Figure 3 shows

an activity diagram developed from a class and an ob-

ject diagram. On the left side it describes the charac-

teristics of an abstract person (name, age, profession

...) and on the right side a concrete person (Franz, 8

years, pupil ...).

Figure 3: Project Writing personal descriptions.

3 METHODOLOGY

In total 230 children participated in the Children’s

Congress 2019. They were all asked for feedback

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280

on the Children’s Congress and 183 (79.57%) were

willing to complete a questionnaire. 84 out of these

183 described themselves as female, 97 as male and 2

did not mention a gender description. At the time of

the study all pupils were between 6 and 16 years old

(there is no knowledge about the age of one partici-

pant who did not want to specify her or his age) with

an arithmetic mean of 11.08. The distribution of the

age can be seen in Figure 4.

The participating teachers and students were also

asked about the Children’s Congress. A total of 16

teachers (7 males and 9 females) and 4 students (2

males and 2 females) accepted this invitation.

The focus of the evaluation lies in the promo-

tion of gifted pupils. Therefore it was examined if

the students experienced freedom of choice, enhance-

ment of academic competence and creating of com-

munity. Moreover, the experiences with these free-

dom of choice, these enhancement of academic com-

petence and these creating of community were inves-

tigated. To reach this aim the questionnaire contained

6 questions for the pupils. Two of them were open

questions, which had to be answered by writing a

short text. The other questions were to answer with

a four- or ﬁve-point Likert scale as described below.

The questionnaire for the teachers and students con-

tained 3 questions, two of them were to answer with a

ﬁve-point Likert scale and one with agreement or not.

4 FINDINGS

4.1 The 3 Pillars of Honors Education

4.1.1 Creating Community

In the project, creating a community is an important

issue. The pupils work in groups and are in active

exchange with their teachers and supporting students.

For communication collaborative platforms are used

where new ideas or problems can be discussed. In

order to make the project visible to other pupils, there

is the big public event at the end where the pupils can

present their results.

The questionnaire contained one question where

the pupils were asked for their own opinion how they

worked together in the class. The pupils could answer

with a ﬁve-point Likert scale (yes, rather yes, partly,

rather not or not at all;) (see Table 2). The results

given in Figure 5 and Table 2 show clearly that the

Children’s Congress deﬁnitly supports and strength-

ens the creation of a community.

4.1.2 Enhancing Academic Competence

The broadening of the own academic competence is

of course a reason why gifted students want to par-

ticipate in the project. Often pupils are focused on

a speciﬁc subject when they start with the project,

because they are used to it from school. But in the

Children’s Congress projects it is not enough to be

good in one speciﬁc ﬁeld of domain. It especially

fosters the creativity and the out-of-the-box think-

ing. The pupils participate in projects on different and

interdisciplinary subjects to ensure a higher compe-

tence in important subjects or dimensions of being a

gifted pupil. Topics like innovation and entrepreneur-

ship, networking or project management prepare the

students for their further life. Combined with skills

in computer science like programming or computa-

tional thinking, the students get a solid and important

grounding for projects even in disciplines other than

computer science.

The own research is a big part of every project.

The students are challenged with real-world problems

in the STEAM ﬁeld and demanded a variety of ap-

proaches. Often students have to start with a lot of

research, doing many experiments and ﬁnally create

their own products that are presented at the ﬁnal event

(Hinterplattner and Sabitzer, 2018).

In the questionnaire the pupils were asked for their

opinion if they learned something and enhanced their

academic competence. The pupils could answer with

a ﬁve-point Likert scale (yes, rather yes, partly, rather

not or not at all;) (see Table 2). When asked about

this, 74% (yes and rather yes) of the pupils stated that

they had learned something. The details of the results

can be seen in Figure 5 and Table 2 and show that the

aim of enhancing academic competence was reached

by most of the pupils.

In addition to the self-assessment by the pupils,

the external assessment by the teachers and students

was of interest. 55% of the teachers and students rated

the learning progress of their pupils as very high, the

rest rated it high. It is interesting to note that all the

teachers and students surveyed stated that the pupils

had acquired additional skills (e.g. presentation skills,

social behavior, goal-oriented work) in addition to the

subject-speciﬁc content.

4.1.3 Offering Bounded Freedom

In every project the pupils get their freedom to work

on their interests in a speciﬁc framework. This ap-

proach is called bounded freedom. As mentioned

before, this should be part of every gifted program,

because the gifted pupils want to develop their own

The Children’s Congress: Creative Computational Thinking to Promote Gifted Pupils

281

Figure 4: Distribution of the age of the pupils who participated in the study.

ideas. The teachers or supporting students will of-

ten deﬁne tasks or highlight problems in existing so-

lutions, making it the pupils’ task to improve or im-

plement solutions to solve these challenges. In every

project the gifted pupils bring in their own ideas and

experiences . Working on these individual projects

where there is no ﬁxed solution or at least no ﬁxed

way to get to a solution gives a pupil a lot of room to

try out skills and make precious experiences; all in a

guided but open framework.

One question was dedicated to bounded freedom,

where the pupils were asked if they were allowed to

ﬁnd their own tasks in the project. The pupils could

answer with a four-point Likert scale, possible an-

swers were: yes, rather yes, rather not or not at all;

The four-point Likert scale was seen as more useful in

this question, because it shouldn’t be able to be neu-

tral in this question. The results can be seen in Figure

5 and Table 2. According to these results most of the

pupils could beneﬁt from bounded freedom, although

some more than in the other questions answered with

no or rather no.

4.2 Experiences

One of the main concerns of the Children’s Congress

is to promote interest in STEAM among children

and adolescents. It is therefore important to ﬁnd

out whether this target group has enjoyed the event.

Children had been asked if they liked the Children’s

Congress. On a ﬁve-point Likert scale, 74% (N=183)

answered with ”very good” or ”good”. In addition

it was from interest, which new interests pupils had

gained from participating. They named e.g. pro-

gramming, robotics, internet-security. The interests

mentioned correlate with the content of the projects

in which the students have worked. This shows very

well that new interests can be generated through this

format. An impressive result is that 48% of the

pupils also worked on the project in their free time.

The external assessment by teachers and students also

showed that the students were very motivated (90%

rated pupils’ motivation as very high or high).

100% of the teachers and students surveyed (3 did

not answer) state that talents can be promoted through

the Children’s Congress.

5 DISCUSSION

The data gained from the survey show that the format

of the Children’s Congress is suitable for achieving

the intended results. The setting shows a high level

of motivation both in the self-assessment and in the

external assessment of the pupils. The pupils are in-

terested in the topic and showed in the presentation

at the end that they go beyond the performance re-

quired at school. The learning effect is also very sat-

isfactory. It was not only possible to achieve positive

effects in terms of content, the pupils showed at the

presentations that they developed further in the area

of so-called soft skills as well as 21st century skills.

6 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK

The Children’s Congress and its preparation phase is

a good way of fostering young talents in STEAM,

not only at school but also at university level. We

could detect all three pillars of gifted education in

the project phase as well as in the ﬁnal event. Fur-

thermore, by interweaving pre- and in-service training

of (prospective) teachers with regular school lessons

it is possible that all participants and target groups

learn from each other and everyone gets involved

and trained in computational thinking and innova-

tive project-based learning. Regarding the enhance-

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Table 2: Distribution of answers to the questions regarding creating community, enhancing academic competence and offering

bounded freedom (N=183).

Question

Answers

Yes Rather yes Partly Rather not Not at all No answer

Creating Community: Did

you work well together in the

project?

115 48 12 0 3 5

Enhancing Academic Compe-

tence: Did you learn something

in the project?

82 53 31 5 5 7

Offering Bounded Freedom:

Were you allowed to ﬁnd your

own tasks in the project?

106 24 x 25 22 6

Figure 5: Distribution of answers to the questions regarding creating community, enhancing academic competence and offer-

ing bounded freedom.

ment of academic competence, especially computa-

tional thinking and computer science topics, it has to

be mentioned, that the examples of the pupils are at a

quite low level and sometimes incorrect in the sense

of computer science. However, using diagrams of this

ﬁeld like activity or class diagrams, involves main el-

ements of computational thinking. And that is, what

we wanted to achieve and what we did, too: offer-

ing a motivating and playful introduction to computer

science and the use of computational thinking in the

sense of problem-solving in any domain.

The challenges we had in the past years,

mainly regarding the communication between stu-

dents, teachers and scientists as well as difﬁculties

due to long distances between schools and university

led us to revise the concept and offers. We are plan-

ning more online-training and -supervision as well as

strong partners that can support us during the whole

project. The revised concept will be described in a

future paper.

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