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Primary education: listening and observing
Primary education: listening and observing

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3 Programming

Programming (or coding) is essentially about applying computational thinking to solve a problem using a computer.

A program is a set of instructions (code) to complete a task, written in a language (the programming language) a computer can understand. Programs can be incredibly simple, for example instructing a toy car to drive forwards, or highly complex, like predicating which search results you want to see when searching the internet or calculating the flight path of a space shuttle. The various aspects of computational thinking – applying a logical approach, decomposing a task, abstracting it and looking for patterns and developing and evaluating an algorithm – are used as the basis of the program. Programs are written using code and there are many languages in which it can be written.

An image of a child coding
Figure 7

In primary schools, programs tend to be written using simple visual languages such as Scratch [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , Alice, Logo or Kodu.