Stimulating Primary School Students' Interest in Data Structures Through ESA's Astro Pi Challenges

In this paper we show how to stimulate the interest of primary school students of the Greek education system in simple data structures through activities carried out during our participation in European Space Agency's Astro Pi Mission Zero and Astro Pi Mission Space Lab projects. In our research, we focus on primary school students and show that it is possible for students to comprehend and use simple data structures such as single- and two-dimensional arrays in the context of simple tasks in the above-mentioned projects. We conducted an in-class evaluation of the proposed approach using groups of students of two different age groups who had no previous contact with the subject of data structures and minimal programming experience. Our results shows that our approach managed to stimulate the interest of the majority of the students, while many of them recommend learning about data structures to future students of the same age group.