Informatics Conference and Computer Programming Workshop for young people aged 8-15

For the first time in Greece, on the initiative of OAC, and with the assistance of scientists from around the world, we held a major IT and Robotics Workshop for young people aged 8 to 15 years, on: "JCrete4Kids" (Saturday, 25 July 2015).

The children showed great interest and participated actively and with many new ideas to create a turbine with Legos. At the same time they created their own car racing game and developed important skills using their imagination playing with MineCraft.

The most important benefit for children is that they come in direct contact with technology and understand the importance of computers as a means to create and implement their ideas. This contribution to changing the children's way of thought is the fundamental mission of the OAC and has a key role in reducing dependencies from the excessive abuse of new technologies and to begin a fruitful relationship with the proper use of modern technology.

The above workshop was implemented in the context of the 5th JCrete Conference (http://www.jcrete.org), which was hosted by the OAC from 20 - July 2015, on the Java programming language. Leading experts from America, Asia, Australia and Europe had the opportunity to extensively analyse the new features and the advantages of Java.

The idea for this conference came in 2010 with the aim of combining science and high technology with the Cretan hospitality and visits to Cretan sights. The impressive participation of attendants sparked the interest of Oracle America in the activities of JCrete. Oracle America is one of the largest companies in the IT sector in the world. So this year's Conference laid the foundations to seek new challenges next year, to improving programming languages, Java application performance, graphics, creating plugins, and more general issues of future generations.