Characterizing the Nature of Programs for educational purposes

Programming plays a paramount role in many educational policies and initiatives. However, the current focus on coding skills poses a risk of giving pupils an over simplistic and impoverished idea of what programming means and involves. Their experiences would be much more significant if learning were aimed at understanding the richness of the nature of programs. In fact, programs are strange creatures that escape simple definitions. They are real, in that they affect our real lives; they are abstract, in that they process abstract entities; and they are concrete, in that they take up space in digital devices memory, and can be copied, transferred, corrupted. Thus, understanding the multifaceted nature of programs is crucial knowledge for all citizens of the digital era, and a fundamental component of such an understanding is getting a sense of how programs are created and work (i.e., the programming process). To the best of our knowledge, there is no Nature of Programs framework (e.g., a set of statements that describe what the nature of programs is), that teachers and policy makers can use to shape their practice and targets. The goal of the WG is developing such a framework, by collecting and organizing contributions from CER, CS experts, and educators.