Programming in schools - why, and how?

Abstract

Today's society sees Information and Communications Technology (ICT) almost exclusively via useful application software, with little understanding of what goes on behind the screen. This has resulted in many highschools abandoning introductory programming in favor of teaching application skills. We argue that schools of general education should emphasize fundamental, timeless concepts underlying ICT, and that personal experience with writing small programs is a good way to introduce such concepts. If programming is taught for its intrinsic intellectual value, rather than as a tool for computer users, we seek the simplest settings that suffice to illustrate the concepts to be taught. We present Kara, a toy world where a robot is programmed as a finite state machine.