This paper describes a school intervention to teach fundamental Computer Science (CS) concepts to 3-11 year old students with a multilanguage robot programming platform (using drag and drop, Python and C++ languages) in Argentina. We analyze students' performance and learning process based on multiple choice test and classroom observations. Data show that all students can intuitively learn sequence, conditional, loops and parameters and that girls performed slightly better than boys. Older students can easily combine these concepts to write a program. The multilanguage platform promotes student spontaneous exploration of more sophisticated CS concepts and languages. These findings imply that introducing CS in mandatory schooling from an inquiry based approach is both achievable and beneficial.

We present a empirical study of orbital decay for the exoplanet WASP-19b, based on mid-time measurements of 74 complete transits (12 newly obtained by our team and 62 from the literature), covering a 10-year baseline. A linear ephemeris best represents the mid-transit times as a function of epoch. Thus, we detect no evidence of the shortening of WASP-19b's orbital period and establish an upper limit of its steady changing rate,Ṗ = −2.294 ms yr −1 , and a lower limit for the modified tidal quality factor Q = (1.23 ± 0.231) × 10 6 . Both are in agreement with previous works. This is the first estimation of Q directly derived from the mid-times of WASP-19b obtained through homogeneously analyzed transit measurements. Additionally, we do not detect periodic variations in the transit timings within the measured uncertainties in the midtimes of transit. We are therefore able to discard the existence of planetary companions in the system down to a few M ⊕ in the first order mean-motion resonances 1:2 and 2:1 with WASP-19b, in the most conservative case of circular orbits. Finally, we measure the empirical Q values of 15 exoplanet host stars which suggest that stars with T eff 5600K dissipate tidal energy more efficiently than hotter stars. This tentative trend needs to be confirmed with a larger sample of empirically measured Q .

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