Didactic Connection between Spreadsheet and Teaching Programming

When we talk about problem-solving skills, then, generally, programming comes to our minds as an activity that can develop algorithmic thinking and abstraction. Regarding the spreadsheet, the software application area could be our first, and mathematics could be our second thought. When spreadsheets and programming are mentioned together, programming of macros is in focus, which is in fact programming. In this paper, we want to focus on how these two areas impact each other, and we want to emphasize that the spreadsheet is an efficient tool to develop algorithmic thinking. Moreover, there is more “crosstalk” between these two tools. This paper will show through examples that there is a two-way connection between spreadsheet and programming; that is why it can be useful to build the concepts of these two topics mutually on each other. Keywords: spreadsheet, programming, problem solving, algorithmic thinking, teaching methodologies