isbn9789526046266

may be necessary; at the very least we should design VPS exercises in such a way that our stronger students
are not wasting a great amount of time on something that merely bores them.
Consideration of the stronger students raises a number of questions. Am I making a mountain out
of a molehill? Does VPS simplify what should not need so much simplification to be learnable, or worse,
what must not be simplified? Does VPS in fact promote a naïve view of computing?
In 1988, a much-publicized and highly controversial manuscript by the celebrated computer scientist
Edsger W. Dijkstra challenged the way computer science is taught. Dijkstra proposed a radical departure
towards a CS1 that is very explicitly and formally grounded in mathematics and logic, and in which
computers and notional machines play no part. While he was at it, Dijkstra singled out software
visualization as a particularly ill-advised and contemptible form of curriculum infantilization that prevents
students from embracing the radically different way of thinking that formal methods – and therefore also
programming – require. Dijkstra’s opinion piece and some of the ensuing critical debate were subsequently
published by ACM (Dijkstra vs. al., 1989).
While the educational change Dijkstra advocated has not materialized, it is enlightening to stop to
imagine what he would have thought about visual program simulation. I have attempted to do so in
Figure 14.1. The interested reader may also wish to take a look at Tedre and Sutinen’s (2008) overview
of the three traditions of computing – mathematical, scientific, and engineering – and the implications of
this tripartition for computing educators.
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