Computer programming has seen a consistent increase in demand over the last decades. This can be attributed to the way we live now. Just look around you! Even vacuum cleaners are smart enough to do things on their own these days!

When students learn programming they develop a broad skill set that goes way beyond simply using a programming language. Programming is an applied way to teach mathematical thinking, while writing and debugging their code students explore the real-world applications of mathematical concepts. Moreover, students learn to decompose complex problems into smaller, manageable entities, finding solutions to subproblems and combining their solutions to solve the original problem. Last but not least, computer programming is fun: what can be more rewarding than instructing a machine to behave as you wish?

"Considering our own subject, the field of computing and programming, an academic institution’s ultimate goal must be much wider than the mastery of a language. It must be nothing less than the art of designing artifacts to solve intricate problems. Some call it the art of constructive thinking. [...] Programming is perhaps the most important new discipline of the post-industrial era."

This is our vision and we are happy to encourage children to explore the fascinating world of computer programming. To aid our students in this exploration, we adapted a 5 semester programming course for students starting from 8th grade. The goal of the course is to help students develop programming, mathematical and problem-solving skills. We also hope that this course may inspire some students to choose programming as their future career, as such courses once did for us.

The course covers the following topics and more: the structure of a program, control structures, basic data types and structures, functions, modules, binary logic, sets, machine representation of data structures, input/output interfaces, files, file systems, databases, command line interface, graphics, analytical and computational geometry, floating point operations, memory management, advanced algorithms and data structures, recursion, testing. During the course we will use the Go programming language as a tool to teach programming concepts.