  Although Natural Language Processing (NLP) is at the core of many tools young
people use in their everyday life, high school curricula (in Italy) do not
include any computational linguistics education. This lack of exposure makes
the use of such tools less responsible than it could be and makes choosing
computational linguistics as a university degree unlikely. To raise awareness,
curiosity, and longer-term interest in young people, we have developed an
interactive workshop designed to illustrate the basic principles of NLP and
computational linguistics to high school Italian students aged between 13 and
18 years. The workshop takes the form of a game in which participants play the
role of machines needing to solve some of the most common problems a computer
faces in understanding language: from voice recognition to Markov chains to
syntactic parsing. Participants are guided through the workshop with the help
of instructors, who present the activities and explain core concepts from
computational linguistics. The workshop was presented at numerous outlets in
Italy between 2019 and 2021, both face-to-face and online.
