Teaching PROLOG programming in the secondary school

Abstract A PROLOG programming course was trialed on a class of twelve 16–17 year-old pupils who had varied previous experience of computing. The pupils were studying a variety of other subjects but would normally be considered to be of a high level of ability. The course was taught over a period of 15 weeks and lasted approximately 60 hours. Concepts covered included recursion and list processing. Most pupils were able to become reasonably competent over this period and one or two excelled. Previous experience of programming appeared to be an advantage if it had involved formal instruction in structured programming but indications were that self-taught BASIC proved to be an obstacle. It was concluded that further investigation of PROLOG as a school programming language would be worthwhile.