A High-School Program in Computer

Science

Judith Gal-Ezer? Catriel Beeriy David Harelz

Amiram Yehudaix

Abstract

The authors are part of a committee that has been designing a new high-school curriculum in computer science and supervising the preparation of a comprehensive study program based on it. The new program emphasizes the foundations of algorithmic thinking, and teaches programming as a way to get the computer to carry out an algorithm. The paper discusses the program and its initial implementation.

1 Introduction

Computers are without doubt the most important invention of the 20th century, having dramatically and irrevocably changed the way we live, and mostly for the better. One of the universally-agreed upon implications of this is that educated people should be computer-literate. This, in turn, creates the need for introducing computers into high-school curricula.

However, computing as a scientific discipline, now called computer science (CS), predates the invention of computers. The first decades of the

?The Open University of Israel. Part of this work was carried out during a sabbatical year spent at the Science Teaching Dept., The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
yDept. of Computer Science, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. zDept. of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
xDept. of Computer Science, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, Israel