Informatics as a Contribution to the Modern Constructivist Education

There are many factors --- currently not well understood --- which influence how efficiently the educational system builds and cultivates digital literacy of pupils. Among them is the quality of the educational policy documents, which set the overall strategy from the governmental point; the level of digital literacy of the schools' management and teachers; the level of concern of the pupils and their parents in acquiring competency; the quality and richness of the teach ing-learning resources; how dedicated the school is to innovation in general; how is competency implemented in schools --- through Informatics or ICT as a subject, or through ICT integrated in all subjects and the quality of collaboration between teachers of different subjects etc. In our department we make a great effort to positively stimulate two of these factors: provide modern university pre-service teacher development and produce attractive and inspiring Informatics textbooks, educational software and learning resources for children, students and teachers. In this paper we present our cur rent series of Informatics textbooks for lower secondary schools. We will analyze in detail the most recent of them: Informatics Around Us . We illustrate the contents and style of the book and we reflect on how our textbooks may help stimulate a kind of bottom-up transformation of our schools into creative and motivating learning playgrounds.