Playing with computing at a children's university

A children's university in Poland is a popular, organized form of inviting young children to activities which are offered and run by academic teachers. We have been involved in such initiatives whose goal is to introduce children to some concepts in computer science. According to Piaget (see 1), children before the age of seven, can think abstractly only about physical, concrete or observable objects and phenomena. Therefore in our approach we work with children in a number of environments which consist of two stages: first they are engaged in cooperative games and puzzles that use concrete objects (like in unplugged CS), and then they move to computational thinking about the objects and about the concepts they are learning. In this way we introduce our young students to such CS concepts as: calculations using mechanical tools, complexity issues (the Tower of Hanoi, Fibonacci numbers, and binary search), and graph models (of real world situations).