Abstract This paper investigates how high school students in an introductory computer science (CS) course approach computing in the logic programming (LP) paradigm. This qualitative study shows how novice students operate within the LP paradigm while engaging in foundational computing concepts and skills: students are engaged in a cyclical process of abstraction, reasoning, and creating representations of their ideas in code while also being informed by the (procedural) requirements and the revision/debugging process. As these computing concepts and skills are also expected in traditional approaches to introductory K-12 CS courses, this paper asserts that LP is a viable paradigm choice for high school novices.

This paper discusses the design of an introductory computer science course for high school students using declarative programming. Though not often taught at the K-12 level, declarative programming is a viable paradigm for teaching computer science due to its importance in artificial intelligence and in helping student explore and understand problem spaces. This paper describes the authors' implementation of a declarative programming course for high school students during a 4-week summer session.