Abstract:

Every individual of the digital natives should be equipped with the basic skills to develop small programs that satisfy his/her business needs. To make sure new generations are capable of coping with the digital era, we have to encourage them to create small programs that solve problems related to their domains of work, most of which still suffer from huge need of solutions. As we do not believe developers should understand all types of businesses around the world in order to develop the right apps, we decided to prepare a «Programming Literacy» curriculum and start teaching it in schools. In the summer of 2013,we conducted a study in which grade 5, 6 and 7 students were taught programming in a summer program. Following this summer program, we introduced a programming curriculum to grades 5 and 6 students in three different schools. Almost 370 elementary students were introduced to programming. The curriculum for grade 5 students covered the HTML language while the curriculum for grade 6 students covered the HTML and SQL languages. Our main aim in this study was to survey targeted groups, using questionnaires, to check for: i) Opinions of parents on the importance of such programs in schools, ii) Opinions of the commercial society on the importance of such programs in schools, iii) Opinions of CS (Computer Science) majors in getting a TD or a master’s in Education to teach such programs, and iv) Opinions of EDU (Education) graduates in getting master’s in Education to teach such programs.

Keywords:

Programing, Education, Curriculum, Elementary.