Combining the power of python with the simplicity of logo for a sustainable computer science education

Abstract

Computer science education in K-12 and for non-majors at university often aims at making students confident with computational thinking by introducing them to programming. We are convinced that such programming classes offer a great opportunity to expose students to core concepts of computer science and thereby contribute to a broad and general education. In this article, we describe our approach and experiences with teaching programming at various levels, namely at primary schools, high schools, and universities. We identify a set of goals that allow us to go beyond the pure teaching of specifics of a given programming language, i. e., syntactical details, and shift the focus towards sustainable topics such as algorithms as problem solving methods and their analysis.