Informatics in Education

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 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.

In this paper, we analyze the errors novice students make when developing invariant based programs. In addition to presenting the general error types, we also look at what students have difficulty with when it comes to expressing invariants. The results indicate that an introductory course utilizing the invariant based approach is suitable from the very beginning of university studies in CS without being ``too advanced''. Although inventing the invariant was not found to be trivial, the main difficulty faced by novices when applying a correct-by-construction approach to program development seems to be related to weak skills in translating intuitive and informal statements into a symbolic form using logical notation in general and quantifiers in particular.