The article describes the history of the knowledge popularization in Russia and the current situation in this domain with the impact of rapidly developing computer technologies. The article also introduces the Construct, Test, Explore (CTE) contest aimed to take students into the scientific phenomena through the game laboratories illustrating the unsolved and difficult problems of mathematics, informatics, and physics. The CTE School project based on the contest ideas is devoted to learning basic algorithms from the theory of information or discrete mathematics through training experiments.

The paper describes our solution of this year hwsw codesign problem with our codesign language (HaSCoL).

Abstract. The paper presents an experience of work with gifted schoolchildren in the field of informatics within the International Contest "Bebras". The idea of tasks that develops algorithmic or computational thinking is presented. The on-line Russian site of the contest and its coverage of schoolchildren of Russia and Belarus is demonstrated.

The paper discusses a certain type of competitions based on distance interaction of a participant with simulation models of concepts from discrete mathematics and computer science. One of them is the "Construct, Test, Explore" (CTE) competition, developed by the authors, the other is the Olympiad in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Informatics (DM&TI). The tasks presented in this paper are generally devoted to the concept of a graph isomorphism. Most of the tasks are verified automatically.