Codinji: Welcome to the Coding Jungle!

In this paper we discuss design principles, educational goals, implementation issues and practical results of the Codinj laboratory organized at the Genova Science Festival to promote computational thinking to a broad audience via a novel combination of the Pocket Code App and the Scratch 3.0 tool. Inspired by the original Jumanji movie, the entire activity is based on the idea of using coding to help participants in being part, conceptually and physically, of a video game. From an educational perspective, the proposed exercises are aimed at introducing, with a clear goal in mind, basic computational thinking concepts such as the notion of state, instructions, executions, events and concurrency.