The Children's Congress: Creative Computational Thinking to Promote Gifted Pupils

The Children’s Congress is an event, developed to meet a demand for strengthening computational thinking and increasing the interest in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) subjects. This congress brings teachers, university students and pupils together to work on interdisciplinary real-life problems. During these proceedings, the pupils slip into the role of researchers and scientists. The Children’s Congress aims at inspiring pupils, students and teachers to work with computational thinking in different subjects, as well as promoting the concept of working in an interor transdisciplinary way. It is a core value of the Children’s Congress that the project should challenge and benefit everyone involved. At university it was shown that students need special requirements in talent promotion to be successful: creating community, offering freedom and enhancing academic competence. In this paper we want to find out if the project offers these requirements and their effects. The findings show that the Children’s Congress includes all pillars of gifted education and moreover that the pupils enjoyed these pedagogical approaches. Besides, the Children’s Congress helps to detect new talents and trains all participants in computational thinking and cross-curricular project-based learning.