Informatics in Education

Niklaus Wirth, one of the most influential pioneers of computer science, passed away in Zurich on January 1st of this year. His contributions to software engineering and especially to programming languages are fundamental, unique, and simply amazing. And they have had a huge impact on computer science education worldwide. His concept of simplicity and transparency has changed the style of programming and moved technical coding to enjoyable, creative work. This opened a new dimension in education. Learning by creative work, developing one’s own products, and then starting to investigate their functionality and properties in order to work on their improvements in a never-ending loop.

CODAP is a widely-used programming environment for secondary school data science. Its direct-manipulation–based design offers many advantages to learners, especially younger students. Unfortunately, these same advantages can become a liability when it comes to repeating operations consistently, replaying operations (for reproducibility), and also for learning abstraction.

The work of Niklaus Wirth, designer of the Pascal programming language, has led to the introduction of programming in schools in many countries often leading to a transformation in the way of thinking. In this article, we provide a retrospective analysis of the Lithuanian experience driven by Pascal and discuss the main ideas about teaching programming originating from this experience. We conducted a qualitative study by means of interviews with experts involved in the development of programming education during its early phases to examine their memories and perspectives.

Spark, one of the products offered by MyQ (formerly Plethora), is a game-based platform meticulously designed to introduce students to the foundational concepts of computer science. By navigating through logical challenges, users delve into topics like abstraction, loops, and graph patterns. Setting itself apart from its counterparts, Spark boasts an innovative formal language and a rich set of features. Unlike traditional platforms, Spark emphasizes computational problem solving over programming syntax, making it accessible to learners of all levels. With progressively challenging levels and an intuitive graphical interface, students engage in problem solving, content creation, and collaboration within the MyQ community. Using Spark makes it less probable for students to utilize generative AI (GAI) to solve challenges, thereby sparing teachers the struggle of assessing tasks that might have been accomplished using GAI.

In this paper, we show the impact of Pascal on numerical software. Using recursion, a new and elegant algorithm for quadrature could be developed.

This autoethnographic paper is part of a special issue trying to answer the question “How to design or choose languages for programming novices?” I will describe howmy programming language Hedy was created, how the initial design goals were formed, how my perspectives on learning and teaching changed along the way, and how Hedy changed with it. The paper also discusses how the Hedy community came to be. Hedy was initially made for my own classroom and teaching, but quickly attracted a community, which I learned a lot from. This special issue has given me a unique opportunity, after 5 years of working on Hedy, to reflect on the process and to learn from it myself, and will hopefully also allow other programming language designers to learn from.

The principles of programming language design for learning and teaching have been described and discussed for several decades. Most influential was the work of NiklausWirth, describing principles such as simplicity, modularity, orthogonality, and readability. So why is this still an area of fundamental disagreement among educators? Why can teachers still not agree on suitable languages for novice programming? Why do we not have a programming language that is designed for education and in widespread use across the world? This paper enumerates and describes educational language design principles in the context of current systems and technologies and discusses why interpretation of these principles shifts as our discipline progresses. We evaluate what these principles mean in our current world, and why a common agreement has not developed. We discuss the relative benefits of pedagogical languages vs. industry languages and articulate why every generation of learners needs their own language.

The choice of programming language for education is an intensely debated topic. On the one hand, the programming language is supposed to be relevant in that its organisation, structures, and paradigms adhere to current standards and best practices in industry and academia. On the other hand, the programming language is expected to be simple, that is, easy to use and, of course, easy to learn. This increasingly means that we need an introduction to concepts shaped by a long history without all the historic baggage.

The first books in Polish about the Pascal programming language appeared in the late 1970s, and were soon followed by a Polish translation of Niklaus Wirth’s book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. At that time, many efforts were made to prepare teachers to teach informatics in schools, and Pascal was one of the topics taught, often with no access to computers.