Although living in the information age and witnessing the rocketing growth of computing technologies, many people have a grossly distorted understanding of what Computer Science is about, and are blithely unaware of the broad range of topics and interest areas that constitute our discipline. The result is that the kind of people who choose to study computer science tend to be those who enjoy individual programming but often lack the other skills that industry needs.
The individuals who will be pushing the boundaries of computer technology in the next century are now in primary school. In a unique approach to cap- turing the interest of those who don’t find computers so interesting, but may be interested in computer science, we are developing activities and games that do not use computers but instead rely on low-tech items that children are familiar with, such as cards, crayons, and string.
The activities have been tested in several primary schools, and have had a very favourable reception. They have stimulated children to delve into such top- ics as data representation, algorithms, process structures, computational com- plexity, cryptography, and human-computer interaction. This paper describes the kind of activities that have been successful, and reports on a study of how effective our approach has been in interesting young people in Computer Science.

Leider ist die ursprünglich im Biblionetz erfasste URL eines Volltextes seit mehr als sechs Monaten nicht mehr gültig (Fehlermeldung 404) und wurde deshalb gelöscht. Es ist mir nicht bekannt, ob das Dokument unter einer anderen Adresse noch frei auf dem Internet verfügbar ist.