Teaching programming for high school students: A distance education experience

Recently, in spite of the growing demand worldwide for professionals in computing, statistic data have revealed a decreasing number of students taking up this area. Given the importance of this field to economic growth and technological development, it is essential to support actions which will encourage students to consider computing as a career. In this article, we describe an experience with a distance programming course given to Brazilian high school students. The results showed that 94% of the students that completed the course were successful in the exams. The dropout rate in this course was high, mainly because students were young, and had difficulties in self-management of their activities. This work brings important contributions: it develops programming and problem solving skills in high school students, it presents the design of a distance programming course for high school students and it contributes to research and actions in distance education.