Programming Camps: Letting Children Discover the Computer Science

Abstract

Daily and summer camps for children are certainly well known to every adult. They provide many activities that encourage interests, create opportunities to start new friendships and, last but not least, help parents with the child care when they are unable to take holidays. However, camps designed as a support for contests in the form as we are presenting them here are unique, established in former Czechoslovakia by Vít and Milan Hejný in the late 70s. In this paper, we provide a basic outline of the structure of these programming camps for high school students, we describe the daily program, and introduce the games and activities used to attract and educate participants. Our hope is to provide a comprehensive overview that can serve as a guideline for organizing similar camps in other countries, and in this way to draw the attention of the talented students, to help them to prepare for the contests like the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and to encourage them to choose a career in computing.