Whitmore offered students a sequence of two classes devoted primarily to programming. The first of these classes, called Computer Science 1, introduced students to the BASIC programming language. In the second course, Computer Science 2, students continued their study of BASIC and were also introduced to PASCAL. A few students who were really interested in programming and who had performed well in Computer Science 2 were allowed to take a more advanced course called Computer Science 5, which consisted of participating in Computer Science 2 classes a second time in order to do more advanced projects. The kind of programming tasks students worked on are described later in this chapter. They ranged from programs to alphabetize lists or compute simple payrolls to those involving relatively complicated graphics and sound.

Computer science courses were quite popular at Whitmore, so that the computer science room and the adjacent lab were used for virtually every one of the seven class periods in the school day during both years of the study. Each year there were 5 or 6 Computer Science 1 classes and 1 Computer Science 2 class. The 11 Computer Science 1 classes taught during the 2 years of this study ranged in size from 8 to 20 students. The 2 Computer Science 2 classes had no more than a dozen students each. As described in more detail in the Appendix, weekly observations were conducted during a 2-year period in the Computer Science 2 classes.