Has the time come to teach parallel programming to secondary school students?

Today, almost every computer has at least one multicore processor. To remain in stride with hardware developments, numerous university faculties oriented towards computer science have introduced parallel programming as an integral part of their courses. The question is, given the availability of parallel architectures, and considering future trends in programming, whether it is time for parallel programming to also become an integral part of the informatics curriculum in secondary schools? This paper presents research conducted in three schools in Croatia over several school years. A total of 162 students from the science-mathematic high schools participated in the research. The results, based on student evaluations, suggest that this course content is equally interesting and somewhat more difficult, and perceived as equally useful as other course content taught to students. Moreover, the findings indicate that students can understand and later apply some of the fundamental concepts of parallel programming.