We are a group of university professors (five women, two men) interested in disseminating and teaching Informatics. We were brought together by the desire to find a way to disseminate original, fresh, and open – in the sense of potentially unlimited – content. We turned our attention to the adolescent audience, 12-13 years old, and to their school, family, and friendship environment, with the aim of generating interest and curiosity towards Informatics.

Perhaps also for a generational issue, our first and common source of inspiration around scientific dissemination was the style of the television programs Quark (1981-1989) and Superquark (1995-2022), through the animations of  Bruno Bozzetto, updated in graphics and technology to the style of today. In shaping our project, we found common ground with StudioRain, a small brave company of professional 3D animation creators based in Palermo. Together with StudioRain, we created 6 short clips , 90-100 seconds each, both in Italian and English, on some topics in Informatics, chosen to be relatively out of the ordinary as well as subjectively significant for us.

We published them on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
We exhibited them in exhibitions, competitions

Festival 2022 | Cartoons On The Bay, conferences, and local events at our university campuses.
We accompanied them with “in-depth pills”

In October 2023, at the first edition of ITADINFO, the Italian Conference on the Teaching of Informatics, we presented this project to the large audience of participants:

An animated miniseries that will guide you to the discovery of a prodigious science

Digitalization has now conquered the world: through it, any element of reality, physical or logical, is represented through numbers, on which it then becomes possible to make calculations, representations, and communications through computer algorithms, in a very fast and effective way. The daily use of smartphones, essential to connect us with people, information and knowledge, and other technological devices that accompany our lives and our homes, produces a sea of ​​digital data that must be represented, processed, and connected to extract knowledge and produce value. This is the task of Computer Science!

What is Informatics after all?

Informatics is a science, but few today recognize it as such, associating the term with technology. Here comes Proxy, a guide that is completely humanized but fully immersed in the digital world, ready to discover and share the secrets of Informatics, to teach us how it works, what its usefulness is and why it is so fascinating to know!

The biggest surprise is that Computer Science is an extremely attractive world, rich in intersections with every other discipline, physics, art, medicine, and many others.
It is an agile, constructive, collaborative and interactive science, which allows us to imagine, build and explore different worlds.

From bioinformatics, to history, to communication… Computer Science is now part of so many universes that it is impossible not to want to know it and be fascinated by it.