A Discovery Approach to Teaching Programming
This journal has recently featured articles that stressed the importance of having elementary school teachers and students learn to write simple computer programs. This emphasis suggests the need to share successful strategies for helping teachers to gain elementary programming skills. Teachers will then be more likely to introduce or offer direction for students' programming in their classrooms. One successful approach uses discovery learning and leads naturally to programming without creat ing inhibiting anxiety. The objective is not to produce expert computer programmers but rather to help teachers understand the elementary constructs of BASIC and to begin writing simple programs. The approach uses short programs that illustrate educationally sound uses of computers in the classroom. The central, elementary constructs of BASIC are taught through the simultaneous study of program listings on paper and program output on the monitor.