Beautiful and usable

Abstract

This paper is concerned with two of the workshop questions: what are the precursors to computer science skills and what are the relationships between programming and computational thinking? Firstly, we suggest that a precursor of programming is the appreciation of beauty and elegance. Secondly, even though there is a strong feeling among computer scientists that computer science is not programming we think that separating programming from computational thinking reduces computational thinking to a subset of problem solving and it loses its reason for being treated as an important component of education. Linking both of these questions is the problem of producing a programming environment for children which is both beautiful and usable.