  The work presented in this paper was carried out in the context of the
project Girls and boys: one day at university promoted by the City of Turin
together with the University of Turin. We were responsible for two educational
activities on robotics and coding hosted at the Computer Science Department,
which made one of its laboratories available for this kind of lesson. At the
conclusion of the lab's sessions, children compiled the Attribution of Mental
State (AMS) questionnaire, which is a measure of mental states that
participants attribute to robots, namely the user's perception of the robot's
mental qualities as compared to humans. We distributed the questionnaires both
to children attending the educational robotics lab and to children performing
coding activities. Results show that the first group attributed higher mental
qualities to the robots, compared to the attribution given by children that did
not have a direct experience with a robot.
