Algorithmic Thinking from the Start

Abstract

Programming education is about introducing the language and way
of thinking of computer science itself, and not only about teaching a
specific programming language. We are actively involved in reaching
out to teachers at primary, at lower and at higher secondary schools,
and in training them to successfully teach programming (and computer
science in a broader sense) to students while aiming at getting to the
core of programming education as early as possible; i. e., avoiding a
lengthy introduction to syntactical details, but teaching algorithmic
thinking. In this paper, we describe a few corner stones of our approach
towards teaching computer science with the above points in mind.