Programming design process: Providing K-12 students with a structure to attain programming goals

The Cyber Innovation Center's Cyber Science curriculum is an interdisciplinary approach to educate high school students to become better cyber-citizens. Through Cyber Science, students learn applicable fundamental concepts from political sciences, history, and law as well as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines as they relate to cyber. In particular, the curriculum includes basic programming and structures; advanced computer science topics; and the concepts of security and privacy in relation to cyberspace. The project-driven nature of the curriculum enables students to refine their computational problem-solving abilities through challenging and engaging programming problems. Mirroring the engineering design process, the Cyber Science curriculum introduces an iterative software development process to give students a structured procedure to approach and solve programming problems. This work in progress will address the purpose for developing the Programming Design Process (PDP), define the model used to create the process, and provide an example of a programming problem guided by the PDP.