Computing as a discipline has common roots with mathematics and written languages, and computing as a way of thinking and handling has been integral to human culture since ever. This is not only a reasonable argument for convincing society to consider informatics as one of the very fundamental pillars of education, but it also puts the potential…

The Computer Science Unplugged activities and project has been an influential STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) initiative, providing enrichment and teaching activities supporting computational thinking. Many of its activities are suitable for children. One of the most popular Unplugged activities is "Kid Krypto",…

A recent report by the joint Informatics Europe & ACM Europe Working Group on Informatics Education emphasizes that: (1) computational thinking is an important ability that all people should possess; (2) informatics-based concepts, abilities and skills are teachable, and must be included in the primary and particularly in the secondary school…

There are many important issues in informatics and many agree that algorithms and programming are most important issues that need to be included in informatics education (Dagiene and Jevsikova, 2012). In this paper, we propose how some of these issues can be easily taught using the notion of a formal system which consists of axioms and inference…

C++ is the most commonly used language in introductory and intermediate programming courses in Bulgarian universities. In recent years this language has developed greatly. Its abstractions are more flexible and affordable than ever before. Such great number of changes are related to the launch of the new standard (known as C++11) that we have…

When first introduced to the analysis of algorithms, students are taught how to assess the best and worst cases, whereas the mean and amortized costs are considered advanced topics, usually saved for graduates. When presenting the latter, aggregate analysis is explained first because it is the most intuitive kind of amortized analysis, often…

The Lithuanian Informatics Olympiad is a problem solving contest for high school students. The work of each contestant is evaluated in terms of several criteria, where each criterion is measured according to its own scale (but the same scale for each contestant). Several jury members are involved in the evaluation. This paper analyses the problem…

The authors underline their opinion that it is preferable to organise the extracurricular education on city level instead of forming autonomous school groups. Putting together students from different schools forces them to share their knowledge and programming techniques. All this helps them get familiar with new practices and experience and…