Programming for Children and Teenagers in Brazil: A 5-year Experience of an Outreach Project

There has been a worldwide surge in programming education initiatives for children and teenagers. In Brazil, this trend faces some challenges, namely inadequate infrastructure of most schools, notably public ones, that lack access to computers and tablets, and basic education curricular requirements not contemplating computer science concepts. This article reports on the five-year experience of an outreach project from a public university in Brazil. The project aims to promote computer science education and to teach programming to children and teenagers. Undergraduate engineering students who participate in the project as members engage in activities such as planning the courses and their schedules, creating partnerships with local schools and other educational projects, giving lectures, producing scientific research and educational materials, as well as promoting the project on social media. The courses use free online programming tools, Python, MIT App Inventor, and Arduino to cover fundamental concepts of programming and computational thinking. They vary approaches and tools according to the age range and available technological resources of the target audience. The use of unplugged activities means to assist in learning and to circumvent computer access problems. Furthermore, they serve for introducing basic programming concepts in classes and motivating students with dynamic activities. Over its five-year existence, the project has achieved its purpose, by reaching a total of 2639 students through 45 workshops and 94 courses. It has provided courses in eleven public schools, created two booklets and one app as free educational material, along with presented papers and posters in scientific conferences.