Sprego Programming

Abstract

Spreadsheet management is a border-land between office applications and programming, however, it is rather communicated that spreadsheet is nothing more than an easily handled fun piece. Consequently, the complexity of spreadsheet handling, the unprepared end-users, their problem solving abilities and approaches do not match. To overcome these problems we have developed and introduced Sprego (Spreadsheet Lego). Sprego is a simplified functional programming language in spreadsheet environment, and such as can be used both as introductory language and the language of end-user programmers. The essence of Sprego is that we use as few and simple functions as possible and based on these functions build multilevel formulas. With this approach, similar to high level programming, we are able solve advanced problems, developing algorithmic skills, computational thinking. The advantage of Sprego is the simplicity of the language, when the emphasis is not on the coding but on the problem. Beyond that spreadsheets would provide real life problems with authentic data and tables which students are more interested in than the artificial environment and semi-authentic problems of high level programming languages.