This paper presents the results of a project on Computational Thinking education for primary school pupils. During the project – called Computational Thinking for children education – 81 students from a primary school in Italy have been guided to the design and development of computer games through the Microsoft Kodu game development platform. Different activities have been proposed to the pupils with the aim of promoting Computational Thinking abilities and skills. A narrative approach has been adopted throughout the project. Preliminary results of the educational experience highlight as the adoption of narrative learning and physical reproduction of manipulative programming objects provide an affordance for the development of Computational Thinking abilities. Furthermore, constancy during the learning process affects the acquisition of game development skills; finally, the design and implementation of computer games using Kodu have had a significant positive influence on the perception of computer programming.

Social media has a very important role in adolescents’ daily life, providing them with means for communicating, sharing, representing themselves and creating and maintaining relationships. However, social media can hide risks for the users which can undermine their mental well-being, especially amongst adolescents. The exploratory research presented in this paper aims at highlighting the relationships between the conscious use of social media by adolescents and their psychological well-being. In particular, we present a pilot study involving N = 80 adolescents (age 16–20), which was designed to analyse the constructs of mental well-being, life satisfaction and resilience in relation to the capacity of adolescents to use social media. Adolescents were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group attended a social media literacy course aimed at raising participants’ awareness of the benefits and pitfalls of social media. The Mann–Whitney U test has been used to assess statistically significant differences between the two groups with respect to the age and the constructs under investigation. However, the test reported no statistically significant values (p > 0.05). We argue that statistically significant differences could be observed by involving a larger sample size. This seems to be confirmed by the low value of the power of the a posteriori test for all the variables considered. In this sense, our pilot study paves the way for new research aimed at investigating the impact of Social Media Literacy on adolescents’ psychological well-being.

Web 2.0 applications and the increasingly use of social networks have been creating new informal learning opportunities. Students interact and collaborate using new learning environments which are structurally different from traditional e-learning environments. In these informal unstructured learning contexts the boundaries between the learning contexts and social spheres disappear, and the definition of the students competences appears more and more important. In this paper we propose a semantic web approach in order to create the basis for a software platform to model learner profiles. In particular we propose to extend the FOAF ontology, used to describe people and their personal relationships, with an ontology related to the IMS Learning Portfolio used to model students’ competencies. This ontology could be a fundamental layer for a new Web 2.0 learning environment in which students’ informal learning activities carried out in social networks can be managed and evaluated.