Programming should be studied in high school just like physics, chemistry or biology. The participants of the round table "IT education at school - the basis of Ukraine's success in the 21st century", which took place in Kyiv at the end of April, are confident of this. At the event, the ways of implementation of the Decree of the CMU "On the plan of measures to support the software industry for 2015" were discussed, according to which an increase in the amount of teaching programming in the framework of the school computer science program for grades 5-9 is provided

However, according to both the profile Association "IT of Ukraine" and the leading IT universities of the country, in the project of the updated computer science program for grades 5-9, very little attention is paid to the development of algorithms. Yes, during 4 years, programming is studied approximately 4-6 pairs per year. Many computer science teachers believe that such a system leads to the fact that students completely forget everything they learned in the previous class, and they have to start from scratch every time. However, there is enough time for learning the techniques of writing texts in a text editor, working with electronic spreadsheets or basic practices of using a computer and e-mail in the school program - almost half of the study time is devoted to this.

"Our goal is not that all schoolchildren become programmers, but programming is not the science of computers, it is the science of how to think and organize processes. In this aspect, in the 21st century, it is necessary for the successful work of an economist, a journalist, and even a designer. And if we do not want to turn Ukraine into a country capable only of consuming IT technologies, then we must change the situation with programming in schools," said Viktor Valeev, director of IT Ukraine.

According to him, individual enthusiastic teachers, despite the prescriptions of the current program, teach schoolchildren to create their own small projects - websites or mobile applications. But this is rather an exception to the rule. In general, university representatives are sure that the school today is practically unable to provide sufficient quality of training in the field of algorithm and program development, and it is impractical to spend time on what schoolchildren learn on their own.

Accordingly, many computer science teachers in schools and representatives of universities support the idea of introducing a separate subject "Programming" in schools, but starting from the 9th grade.

Of course, the issue of training computer science teachers can be very difficult, especially for villages and small towns. However, both universities and IT companies promise to help schools with training courses and teacher training in simple, but still popular, programming languages.

As for the arguments regarding the difficulty of learning programming by schoolchildren, it can be noted that in British schools, programming has already started to be taught from the age of 5. British teachers expect to be able to teach students as young as 14 programming in two languages, as well as understanding how a computer works, how digital objects are stored and processed. In Estonia, they went even further and launched an experiment in teaching mathematics based entirely on the use of computers using the revolutionary method of Professor Konrad Wolfram.

According to the material: itexpert.org.ua