Extracurricular Activities for Improving the Perception of Informatics in Secondary Schools Carlo Bellettini 1 , Violetta Lonati 1 , Dario Malchiodi 1 , Mattia Monga 1 , Anna Morpurgo 1 , Mauro Torelli 1 , and Luisa Zecca 2 1 Dip. di Informatica, Universit` a degli Studi di Milano 2 Dip. di Scienze Umane per la Formazione, Universit` a degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca Abstract. In order to introduce informatic concepts to students of Ital- ian secondary schools, we devised a number of interactive workshops con- ceived for pupils aged 10–17. Each workshop is intended to give pupils the opportunity to explore a computer science topic: investigate it firsthand, make hypotheses that can then be tested in a guided context during the activity, and construct viable mental models. This paper reports about how we designed and conducted these workshops. 1 Introduction Several voices have been recently raised to urge a new understanding in schools of the nature and scope of informatics. A report issued by the UK Royal Society on UK schools [14] has documented clearly how a focus on the instrumental value of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) failed to lead pupils and teachers to develop any real knowledge of computing sciences. While informatics and computational thinking have the potential to be very formative for pupils, and several core aspects of computing are sufficiently basic to be taught as a fun- damental subject in all the secondary schools, among the general public—but sometimes also among the teachers who are responsible of conducting courses of informatics 1 —the scientific discipline is often blurred by the use of office au- tomation tools, or the Internet communication facilities and their social impact. Although these activities might indeed need special skills, they can be presented and mastered without referring to computing at all. Therefore, to be able to show to pupils the appeal of a rigorous scientific discipline we believe it is im- portant to focus again on the basics of informatics. Thus, we started devising some enrichment program activities aimed at presenting and discussing the core of informatics as the “automatic processing of information”. We wanted to expose to informatics a variety of pupils of different ages, not necessarily involved in a computing curriculum or with a previous knowledge of 1 We recently asked to a group of prospective teachers of informatics to define the discipline with a statement: 5 out of 17 identified informatics with communication technologies or other devices and a recurring theme was the emphasis on the im- provement “of life quality”. Common misconceptions among teachers are reported also by [13].