Resumen: In this paper we report the work that jeKnowledge (Júnior Empresa da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologias da Universidade de Coimbra), a student-led initiative, has done in the ‘jeKnowledge academy’ courses to actively engage Portuguese high-school students in STEM education through hands-on projects based on the low-cost Arduino platform. F2F activities, based on a peer-assisted learning strategy, were complemented with tutorials and more advanced project suggestions in a blog. Pre and post surveys on students'' attitudes towards programming and peer-coaching were administered to pre-university and first year college participants, finding an overall increase in the Likert scale for all the programming-related constructs under study (confidence, interest, gender, usefulness and professional) after the introductory course. As regards the peer-based learning approach, younger students seemed to be more eager to be taught in a less formal way than their older counterparts. The course resulted in high degrees of satisfaction for both the student tutors and their tutees. Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2017.07.007 Año: 2017 Publicado en: COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR 76 (2017), 51-58 ISSN: 0747-5632 Factor impacto JCR: 3.536 (2017) Categ. JCR: PSYCHOLOGY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY rank: 16 / 135 = 0.119 (2017) - Q1 - T1 Categ. JCR: PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL rank: 8 / 85 = 0.094 (2017) - Q1 - T1 Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 1.555 - Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) (Q1) - Psychology (miscellaneous) (Q1) - Human-Computer Interaction (Q1)