Using Visual Basic for Excel Applications for Developing Students’ Programming Skills

The paper presents an approach for developing and refining the students’ practical and applied skills in programming by using the capabilities of Visual Basic for Excel Applications. Five problems are given along with their solutions and are realized through integrated features for programming in Excel. These examples help facilitate the execution of the following activities – determining the number of even and odd numbers in a finite set of elements and extracting the corresponding lists; finding all prime numbers in a given interval; merging the elements of two ordered one-dimension arrays with a determined number of elements into a third ordered array; finding a randomly generated integer within a given interval. The suggested approach and problems aim to help students apply the acquired knowledge and skills having to do with using branched and cyclical algorithmic constructions, working with one-dimension arrays as well as creatively using the acquired digital skills for processing spreadsheets data in the area of programming in the high school stage.